Do you think that 200 "unarmed" people could take down 5 people armed with box cutters? If so, then why didn't they?
Because 9/11 was a social engineering attack. See the reports that passengers on United Flight 93 - the only flight were information that this wasn't a traditional hijack was known to be received - started fighting back.
Since we're playing the analogy game, let's go for mine:
Let's say the painter has constructed a maze, that anyone can enter for free. To get to the place to view the painting, one must follow a number of signs that provide directions through the maze. Those signs also have advertising placed on them, such that people viewing those signs might see the ads. Now one person takes the time to walk through the maze and writes down the sequence of turns to make it to the picture; left, straight, right, right, straight. This person then makes copies of those instructions and stands outside the entrance to the maze and offers those instructions to others, effectively allowing them to not look at the maze's directions or ads.
That's a deep link; it gets you to a specific point without having to navigate the intermediate links yourself. If those intermediate points contain ads, then you might not see them. The final links on the plantiff's website seem to be direct links to the audio files, much as the defendant has been accussed of publishing. In the end, the act of listening is the same; if this was a matter of embedded audio with ads on the page, I agree the photograph analogy would be a better fit, since it would be changing the context of presentation of the copyrighted work.
The NES gun was wired and had only one button. The patent actually covers a wireless device where there are two buttons: one on the underside, a "trigger", and a second on the top surface, near a natural position of the thumb while the hand is in position for the index finger to use the trigger. Each claim of the patent includes a button or trackpad-like surface on the top side, opposite of the trigger.
because of GPL section 7, Novell's patent deal with Microsoft is more or less useless for Novell
I don't have a law degree, but there's more to this agreement than Section 7. Section 7 of the GPL only covers future use and distribution of the software, however patent indemnity agreements cover past infractions. A Microsoft lawsuit against the developer of a GPL'ed component will result Novell's loss of that component, but this patent indemnity should protect them from any monetary claims from Microsoft due to the infringement. Section 12 of the GPL states that liability for damanges may be the responsiblity of the end user, not necessarily the author. Because of this, any distributor could be sued for damanges for patent violation; this, and this alone, is the value I see in Novell's agreement with Microsoft.
A supply of 80k units for the entirety of Japan is ridiculous. Even the Xbox would have managed to sell out of that.
According to a GameSpot article, launch-weekend sales of the Xbox360 in Japan were reported between 41,817 and 62,135 units, out of an estimated supply of 159,000 units.
I wouldn't spend as much for a copy of Windows 3.1 as I would for a copy of XP, and it's the same thing with games.
Except with games, it's not due only to the time since release, but also due to used game sales. After a few months on the market, stores which carry used games will start to have copies at ten, maybe fifteen dollars less than new retail. The more popular the title, the smaller the discount. But the used discount is enough to start pulling sales away from the manufaturer. The per-unit incremental cost on games is low, and so the manufacturer can choose to drop the MSRP if the used game market starts pulling too many sales. The manufacturer can repeat this over and over, and each reduction will cost the used game sellers some of their profit (as the value of their used game inventory will decline).
That's why I believe manufacturers are more agressive with price cuts - it's their primary weapon against the used game market. PC games don't decline in price as fast as console games do (or my memory is just very selective). Once a title gets to "Greatest Hits" status with a $20 new MSRP, the used market seems to be pretty minimal. As the quoted article says, most people who want a game will pay $20 for it and it shows.
It's been nine years since Apple has produced a digital still camera, but Apple was an early innovator in the field (even if other companies, like Kodak, did the manufacturing). Rather than hope for new notebooks or the mythical "widescreen iPod", I'm going to hope that Apple is getting back into the digital still camera market. Perhaps the secret to Apeture's success could be getting people to use a digital camera that extends the desktop workflow into the camera?
This isn't in the iTunes license, but rather in the customer agreement to create an iTunes Store account. iTunes is fully functional without the ability to purchase music from the iTunes Store; it's not like Apple requires you to get an iTunes Store account... well, unless you want free tracks from them, or want to buy something from them. But that's definitely not a shrink-wrap or click-wrap deal.
they could even open source the code, in this case, the code is worthless with out the contracts with the cell providers
Except that the cell providers themesevles could then enter the market themselves and then undercut the service price of the company that developed the software. The phone companies are experts in this type of competition. After all, the phone company won't really be paying itself for the raw data, much like they don't really pay themselves for the wire pair that the use to provide your DSL service. I think you'd only need data from one "big" cell phone network to make the software work; I suspect that Sprint, Verizon, and at&t (Cigular) all have sufficiently large cell phone networks to work such a system on their own.
iTunes sells DRM-encumbered music for $0.99 per song. This Jessica Simpson song (which, for now, appears to be a one-off in MP3 formwat) is priced at $1.99. Assuming that you put no value on having "your name" in the version of the song you download, should we consider this a test of the price consumers will pay to be able to do what they want with their music?
I've seen reports that record companies aren't "happy" with the royalties they're getting from iTunes. Could higher-priced, DRM-free releases be part of their solution? Skeptical though I am, I hope so. Even though I have a Mac, an iPod, and many tracks I've bought from the iTunes store, I'd rather Apple not be the "only game in town" for music on my iPod. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, even through a reality distortion field I expect.
For what the PS3 currently is proposed to cost, you can get the kid...
Some people complained that even the PS2 was too expensive at launch; Sony left the PSone on the market, with a strong library of inexpensive games, to serve those who didn't want to buy the "expensive" next-generation system yet. The PS2 isn't disappearing this year. It's going to stay around, with a strong library of inexpensive games, for those who don't want to buy the "expensive" next-generation system yet.
Besides, if a kid is asking for a PS3, I suspect that they already have a PS2 (or Xbox or GameCube), a cell phone, a TV, a DVD player, a Game Boy, and tons of games and DVDs. And regardless, if the kid wants a PS3, then they aren't likely to be satisfied with anything else, unless they've already figured out that they can manipulate their parents into buying a $299-$399 X360 by instead asking for the $499-$599 PS3...
Attention! After the above letter was written, U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, sent a very strong letter of rebuke to the Public Broadcasting System, denouncing the use of federal funds to produce and distribute materials for children wherein cartoon characters were used to promote homosexual ideas and purposes. She wrote, "Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in the episode." Thank you, Mrs. Secretary!
That is precisely the concern that led to my comments in January. At its heart, the issue before us is the "sexual re-orientation" and brainwashing of children by homosexual advocacy groups. It is going on in many schools today, both public and private. Make absolutely sure your child is not being targeted for this purpose. If it happens in his or her classroom, take an army of like-minded parents with you to the next board meeting, and let your voices be heard to the rooftops!
Remember, you heard it here.
What was the purpose in leaving that out, since you had no problem copying the main part of that long letter?
The abstract makes me think this was a poorly conducted study. Where's the control group that played no games? What if playing games reduces these thoughts in a way that varies based on the game? You could also have gotten this result by baselining the attitudes of the subjects before the experiment, but then you also might have lost all the interesting quotes like "Media violence exposure may play a role in the development of negative attitudes and behaviors related to health."
They did find that blood pressure tends to go up while playing games. In addition, those with exposure to home and community violence had a more sigificant blood pressure change with the violent game than with the other game. I think they might have just verified post-traumatic stress disorder.
In point of fact, both were context switching in and out of both CPUs pretty regularly.
But it didn't have to be that way; most multiprocessor operating systems will allow you to bind processes to a specific set of processors. In fact, some mixed workloads (although, admittedly, rare) show significant improvement when you optimize in this way. I've even seen optimized systems where one CPU is left unused by applications - generally in older multiprocessor architectures where one CPU was responsible for servicing all the hardware interrupts in the system.
dual core, like most parallelized technologies, doesn't do nearly as much as you think it does, and won't until our compilers and schedulers get much better than they are now.
Compilers are being held back by the programming languages chosen by developers. As hardware concurrency increases, the technology behind compilers for imperative and procedural languages (C, Pascal, Fortran, Java) shows just ill-suited it is take advantage of that power. Instead, we will need to move to new languages that will enable compilers to optimize for concurrency, much as circuit designers moved from alegbraic logic languages (ABEL, PALASM) to concurrent logic languages (VHDL, Verilog) with the transition from programmable logic devices to field programmable gate arrays.
For those of us that use alternative browsers (because IE don't run natively on Linux, of course), can we sue companies whose sites dont show properly or are unusable in them?
I'd say the Americans with Disabilities Act would be more likely to cover those whose computers are disabled by running Windows and IE; perhaps this is why it seems like everything in creation is IE-"optimized".
First, they're terming "lag" as anything that delays your game - network latency, network loss, system latency. I can't envision their card reducing network latency or loss, but it certainly could be optimized for system latency. First off, a lot of network adapters try to play nice by interrupting the system only after multiple packets have arrived (resulting in nearly-full buffers) or after data has been waiting in a buffer for a certain period (sometimes up to 100ms, depending on the card). Creating a "gaming card" that reduces these delays by default (which really avid gamers can reduce as well, since most drivers allow these parameters to be tuned) could allow a company to market a "new network card" that's really just a differently tuned driver set.
More improbably, though, is that Bigfoot Networks could implement and expose a programmable protocol processor on the card. This won't help existing games, but would enable developers to move some of their protocol closer to the wire, where it may be possible to buffer data more efficiently (send one "game state" packet to the protocol engine, which can then create the multiple unicast packets needed, instead of sending multiple wrapped network packets with effectively the same data across the PCI bus multiple times). However, this will require games to be adapted for it - somewhat unlikely - and even then would only provide significant help for game servers. But since many games - Quake, Half Life, et al - are hosted by home users, it might reduce lag in some situations.
Of course, without a product to play with or any real announcements from the company, it's just speculation at this point. But I'd love to play with a programmable protocol processor - such a device could open up new opportunities for network efficiency innovation (running PPPoE in hardware, integrated firewalls like the nForce ethernet, not to mention TCP, segmentation, and checksum offloading).
So a bunch of recruiters think "the game industry is going through growing pains similar to what Hollywood once experienced", and that their new Professional Electronic Entertainment Recruiters (PEER) organization "will provide an alternative to any potential unionization of game creators" with "a stringent standard of professionalism and conduct within game recruiting" because "by being honest with [game makers] about their options, "quality of life" problems like those that surfaced last year eventually will subside."
Sounds vaguely like a protection racket to me - 'work with us or we might recommend unionization to those who want better benefits.' Recruiters talking about benefits is kinda like the user car dealer talking about the car - all they care about is moving you out in one & getting their cut on the deal.
Why does everyone presume that PS3 games will ship exclusively on BD? Many of the launch titles for the PS2 shiped on CD's, and I'm not going to be surprised if this holds true even longer on the PS3 launch - especially for multi-platform games that have to fit on a DVD for the Xbox360.
As much as people call it a "1x BD drive", I've not seen any speculation as to the performance of the drive when reading DVD media, which I think is the comparison that will matter.
I don't understand why Linus seems to be confusing digital signing with DRM.
I read Linus's statement as a what-if, not a this-is. It would be possible for Red Hat to add a private kernel patch that does 'driver signing' like Windows does to protect users from loading 'untested' drivers on their system. Red Hat would have to provide the source code to the system under the current GPLv2; they would have to distribute the public key used for signature verification but would be allowed to keep their private key. This would allow others in the community to create their own 'driver signing' system, with their own key pair, or to modify the existing Red Hat code to defang it or allow loading unsigned modules while marking the kernel as tainted (as loading a proprietary-licensed kernel module currently does).
Under GPLv3's DRM provisions, though, it appears that Red Hat would also have to distribute their private key as well. (GPL v3 Draft, Section 1: "Complete Corresponding Source Code also includes any encryption or authorization codes necessary to install and/or execute the source code of the work, perhaps modified by you") Distributing the signing key would completely eliminate the effectiveness of their 'driver signing' program, since any J. Random Hacker could sign their just-compiled kernel module and sign it, even if it's horribly broken and will crash systems on load. This removes Red Hat's ability to do a value-add for people who want to contract with them (which is separate from their right to use the software), while it doesn't harm others in the community (we can still recompile the kernel without the 'driver signing' and distribute it). This is limiting the ability of developers to innovate, simply because it does certain things that approximate what a DRM system does. As Linus said, baby and the bathwater...
There will be systems where a GPLv3 license may be quite useful; for instance, I would love to see programs and projects that provide audio and video encoding functions (such as Ogg) adapt GPLv3, so that their code cannot be taken and used as the base of a DRM-restricted media format. (GPL v3 Draft, Section 3: "No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection measure", would explicity allow circumvention of any added DRM, since the DMCA only covers "effective technological protection measures.") Those programs are much closer to the 'content creator' class that Linus described in his posts, and I hope those developers will feel it is moral for them to prevent their code from being used in a DRM-restricted system.
That seems like a lot of work for a player who wants to play a whole season using realworld teams.
I grab a copy of NCAA Football each year, mostly because I'm a huge fan of my alma mater. NCAA regulations allow EA to put the team names, logos, and stadiums in the game, but not player names. The game will let you customize the roster and add names, which the announcers will then use when recognized. Obviously EA expects us to do this -- why else would "Vick" be in there, when I've never seen their name generator spit that name out?
Of course, the games always miss a few players that get onto the final roster each year. There are some people who'll set those players up as "superstars", but I agree that it leads to a less fulfilling game. The only issue is that the "stats controls" are very difficult to figure out, making player tuning a very annoying art, which is why I buy most years - to get the new pre-tuned players.
Why can't some developer just let us put in "prior year stats" for players and use those to determine all those settings for each player? Height and weight are easy to come by; dedicated fans can find out a lot of the strength training results for their team, and for returning players it's easy to find prior-year stats. Add on the ability to load your own textures for uniforms, and I expect that a game with great execution (as opposed to Madden) could find the fanatical following needed to generate the roster files and graphics needed to convert "Canadian Football '07" into the best NFL title out there.
I can't think of an administration that has so brazenly broken so many fundamental rules.
The President used to wield much more power, until the abuses of Richard Nixon were exposed in the Watergate investigation. If not for the restraints added to the Presidency after Nixon, we might not even be aware of many of the current Administration's failings.
consequences more severe? This would be akin to throwing jaywalkers in jail.
It's not just a matter of the behavior, but the environment in which the behavior occurs. We need to be vigilant that our government respects its own laws and the rights of its citizens, and I feel the penalties for abuse of power should be severe. Even if the abuse of power is simply tracking the computers of its citizens without a warrant (which cookies can do, as you move from network to network, such as while travelling), we should consider enacting laws when the Administration fails to follow its own rules.
This is completely a non issue unless someone can proove that the NSA went to the trouble to track the cookies outside of their website.
My problem isn't that they broke their own rules on the use of cookies, but that they broke their own rules. This is an Administration which has been dogged recently with allegations of potentially illegal behavior, and this is yet another sample of it. The more we let the Administration know that discovered lapses - however minor - will be reported, the more I hope they will reconsider pushing the boundaries.
Once again it prooves the left has gone completely bonkers.
I'd say it's more a statement that the current Administration has problems following its own rules - but, then, most Administrations run into that problem. Our government is designed with checks and balances, and practically everyone tries to get away with stuff. It's not that either side has gone bonkers, it's just that the side in power gets the criticism levelled on it. If they can't handle it, then they shouldn't have (a) run for office, (b) accepted the appointment, or (c) taken a government job.
Slashdot Mirror
Because 9/11 was a social engineering attack. See the reports that passengers on United Flight 93 - the only flight were information that this wasn't a traditional hijack was known to be received - started fighting back.
Let's say the painter has constructed a maze, that anyone can enter for free. To get to the place to view the painting, one must follow a number of signs that provide directions through the maze. Those signs also have advertising placed on them, such that people viewing those signs might see the ads. Now one person takes the time to walk through the maze and writes down the sequence of turns to make it to the picture; left, straight, right, right, straight. This person then makes copies of those instructions and stands outside the entrance to the maze and offers those instructions to others, effectively allowing them to not look at the maze's directions or ads.
That's a deep link; it gets you to a specific point without having to navigate the intermediate links yourself. If those intermediate points contain ads, then you might not see them. The final links on the plantiff's website seem to be direct links to the audio files, much as the defendant has been accussed of publishing. In the end, the act of listening is the same; if this was a matter of embedded audio with ads on the page, I agree the photograph analogy would be a better fit, since it would be changing the context of presentation of the copyrighted work.
The NES gun was wired and had only one button. The patent actually covers a wireless device where there are two buttons: one on the underside, a "trigger", and a second on the top surface, near a natural position of the thumb while the hand is in position for the index finger to use the trigger. Each claim of the patent includes a button or trackpad-like surface on the top side, opposite of the trigger.
I don't have a law degree, but there's more to this agreement than Section 7. Section 7 of the GPL only covers future use and distribution of the software, however patent indemnity agreements cover past infractions. A Microsoft lawsuit against the developer of a GPL'ed component will result Novell's loss of that component, but this patent indemnity should protect them from any monetary claims from Microsoft due to the infringement. Section 12 of the GPL states that liability for damanges may be the responsiblity of the end user, not necessarily the author. Because of this, any distributor could be sued for damanges for patent violation; this, and this alone, is the value I see in Novell's agreement with Microsoft.
According to a GameSpot article, launch-weekend sales of the Xbox360 in Japan were reported between 41,817 and 62,135 units, out of an estimated supply of 159,000 units.
Except with games, it's not due only to the time since release, but also due to used game sales. After a few months on the market, stores which carry used games will start to have copies at ten, maybe fifteen dollars less than new retail. The more popular the title, the smaller the discount. But the used discount is enough to start pulling sales away from the manufaturer. The per-unit incremental cost on games is low, and so the manufacturer can choose to drop the MSRP if the used game market starts pulling too many sales. The manufacturer can repeat this over and over, and each reduction will cost the used game sellers some of their profit (as the value of their used game inventory will decline).
That's why I believe manufacturers are more agressive with price cuts - it's their primary weapon against the used game market. PC games don't decline in price as fast as console games do (or my memory is just very selective). Once a title gets to "Greatest Hits" status with a $20 new MSRP, the used market seems to be pretty minimal. As the quoted article says, most people who want a game will pay $20 for it and it shows.
It's been nine years since Apple has produced a digital still camera, but Apple was an early innovator in the field (even if other companies, like Kodak, did the manufacturing). Rather than hope for new notebooks or the mythical "widescreen iPod", I'm going to hope that Apple is getting back into the digital still camera market. Perhaps the secret to Apeture's success could be getting people to use a digital camera that extends the desktop workflow into the camera?
This isn't in the iTunes license, but rather in the customer agreement to create an iTunes Store account. iTunes is fully functional without the ability to purchase music from the iTunes Store; it's not like Apple requires you to get an iTunes Store account... well, unless you want free tracks from them, or want to buy something from them. But that's definitely not a shrink-wrap or click-wrap deal.
Only if you haven't muted audio. If you mute the audio output and then reboot (or shutdown and then power on), you won't hear the power-on chime.
Except that the cell providers themesevles could then enter the market themselves and then undercut the service price of the company that developed the software. The phone companies are experts in this type of competition. After all, the phone company won't really be paying itself for the raw data, much like they don't really pay themselves for the wire pair that the use to provide your DSL service. I think you'd only need data from one "big" cell phone network to make the software work; I suspect that Sprint, Verizon, and at&t (Cigular) all have sufficiently large cell phone networks to work such a system on their own.
I've seen reports that record companies aren't "happy" with the royalties they're getting from iTunes. Could higher-priced, DRM-free releases be part of their solution? Skeptical though I am, I hope so. Even though I have a Mac, an iPod, and many tracks I've bought from the iTunes store, I'd rather Apple not be the "only game in town" for music on my iPod. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, even through a reality distortion field I expect.
Some people complained that even the PS2 was too expensive at launch; Sony left the PSone on the market, with a strong library of inexpensive games, to serve those who didn't want to buy the "expensive" next-generation system yet. The PS2 isn't disappearing this year. It's going to stay around, with a strong library of inexpensive games, for those who don't want to buy the "expensive" next-generation system yet.
Besides, if a kid is asking for a PS3, I suspect that they already have a PS2 (or Xbox or GameCube), a cell phone, a TV, a DVD player, a Game Boy, and tons of games and DVDs. And regardless, if the kid wants a PS3, then they aren't likely to be satisfied with anything else, unless they've already figured out that they can manipulate their parents into buying a $299-$399 X360 by instead asking for the $499-$599 PS3...
Care to enforce that rule with America's Funniest Home Videos as well?
The abstract makes me think this was a poorly conducted study. Where's the control group that played no games? What if playing games reduces these thoughts in a way that varies based on the game? You could also have gotten this result by baselining the attitudes of the subjects before the experiment, but then you also might have lost all the interesting quotes like "Media violence exposure may play a role in the development of negative attitudes and behaviors related to health."
They did find that blood pressure tends to go up while playing games. In addition, those with exposure to home and community violence had a more sigificant blood pressure change with the violent game than with the other game. I think they might have just verified post-traumatic stress disorder.
But it didn't have to be that way; most multiprocessor operating systems will allow you to bind processes to a specific set of processors. In fact, some mixed workloads (although, admittedly, rare) show significant improvement when you optimize in this way. I've even seen optimized systems where one CPU is left unused by applications - generally in older multiprocessor architectures where one CPU was responsible for servicing all the hardware interrupts in the system.
dual core, like most parallelized technologies, doesn't do nearly as much as you think it does, and won't until our compilers and schedulers get much better than they are now.
Compilers are being held back by the programming languages chosen by developers. As hardware concurrency increases, the technology behind compilers for imperative and procedural languages (C, Pascal, Fortran, Java) shows just ill-suited it is take advantage of that power. Instead, we will need to move to new languages that will enable compilers to optimize for concurrency, much as circuit designers moved from alegbraic logic languages (ABEL, PALASM) to concurrent logic languages (VHDL, Verilog) with the transition from programmable logic devices to field programmable gate arrays.
I'd say the Americans with Disabilities Act would be more likely to cover those whose computers are disabled by running Windows and IE; perhaps this is why it seems like everything in creation is IE-"optimized".
More improbably, though, is that Bigfoot Networks could implement and expose a programmable protocol processor on the card. This won't help existing games, but would enable developers to move some of their protocol closer to the wire, where it may be possible to buffer data more efficiently (send one "game state" packet to the protocol engine, which can then create the multiple unicast packets needed, instead of sending multiple wrapped network packets with effectively the same data across the PCI bus multiple times). However, this will require games to be adapted for it - somewhat unlikely - and even then would only provide significant help for game servers. But since many games - Quake, Half Life, et al - are hosted by home users, it might reduce lag in some situations.
Of course, without a product to play with or any real announcements from the company, it's just speculation at this point. But I'd love to play with a programmable protocol processor - such a device could open up new opportunities for network efficiency innovation (running PPPoE in hardware, integrated firewalls like the nForce ethernet, not to mention TCP, segmentation, and checksum offloading).
Sounds vaguely like a protection racket to me - 'work with us or we might recommend unionization to those who want better benefits.' Recruiters talking about benefits is kinda like the user car dealer talking about the car - all they care about is moving you out in one & getting their cut on the deal.
As much as people call it a "1x BD drive", I've not seen any speculation as to the performance of the drive when reading DVD media, which I think is the comparison that will matter.
I read Linus's statement as a what-if, not a this-is. It would be possible for Red Hat to add a private kernel patch that does 'driver signing' like Windows does to protect users from loading 'untested' drivers on their system. Red Hat would have to provide the source code to the system under the current GPLv2; they would have to distribute the public key used for signature verification but would be allowed to keep their private key. This would allow others in the community to create their own 'driver signing' system, with their own key pair, or to modify the existing Red Hat code to defang it or allow loading unsigned modules while marking the kernel as tainted (as loading a proprietary-licensed kernel module currently does).
Under GPLv3's DRM provisions, though, it appears that Red Hat would also have to distribute their private key as well. (GPL v3 Draft, Section 1: "Complete Corresponding Source Code also includes any encryption or authorization codes necessary to install and/or execute the source code of the work, perhaps modified by you") Distributing the signing key would completely eliminate the effectiveness of their 'driver signing' program, since any J. Random Hacker could sign their just-compiled kernel module and sign it, even if it's horribly broken and will crash systems on load. This removes Red Hat's ability to do a value-add for people who want to contract with them (which is separate from their right to use the software), while it doesn't harm others in the community (we can still recompile the kernel without the 'driver signing' and distribute it). This is limiting the ability of developers to innovate, simply because it does certain things that approximate what a DRM system does. As Linus said, baby and the bathwater...
There will be systems where a GPLv3 license may be quite useful; for instance, I would love to see programs and projects that provide audio and video encoding functions (such as Ogg) adapt GPLv3, so that their code cannot be taken and used as the base of a DRM-restricted media format. (GPL v3 Draft, Section 3: "No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection measure", would explicity allow circumvention of any added DRM, since the DMCA only covers "effective technological protection measures.") Those programs are much closer to the 'content creator' class that Linus described in his posts, and I hope those developers will feel it is moral for them to prevent their code from being used in a DRM-restricted system.
I grab a copy of NCAA Football each year, mostly because I'm a huge fan of my alma mater. NCAA regulations allow EA to put the team names, logos, and stadiums in the game, but not player names. The game will let you customize the roster and add names, which the announcers will then use when recognized. Obviously EA expects us to do this -- why else would "Vick" be in there, when I've never seen their name generator spit that name out?
Of course, the games always miss a few players that get onto the final roster each year. There are some people who'll set those players up as "superstars", but I agree that it leads to a less fulfilling game. The only issue is that the "stats controls" are very difficult to figure out, making player tuning a very annoying art, which is why I buy most years - to get the new pre-tuned players.
Why can't some developer just let us put in "prior year stats" for players and use those to determine all those settings for each player? Height and weight are easy to come by; dedicated fans can find out a lot of the strength training results for their team, and for returning players it's easy to find prior-year stats. Add on the ability to load your own textures for uniforms, and I expect that a game with great execution (as opposed to Madden) could find the fanatical following needed to generate the roster files and graphics needed to convert "Canadian Football '07" into the best NFL title out there.
The President used to wield much more power, until the abuses of Richard Nixon were exposed in the Watergate investigation. If not for the restraints added to the Presidency after Nixon, we might not even be aware of many of the current Administration's failings.
It's not just a matter of the behavior, but the environment in which the behavior occurs. We need to be vigilant that our government respects its own laws and the rights of its citizens, and I feel the penalties for abuse of power should be severe. Even if the abuse of power is simply tracking the computers of its citizens without a warrant (which cookies can do, as you move from network to network, such as while travelling), we should consider enacting laws when the Administration fails to follow its own rules.
My problem isn't that they broke their own rules on the use of cookies, but that they broke their own rules. This is an Administration which has been dogged recently with allegations of potentially illegal behavior, and this is yet another sample of it. The more we let the Administration know that discovered lapses - however minor - will be reported, the more I hope they will reconsider pushing the boundaries.
Once again it prooves the left has gone completely bonkers.
I'd say it's more a statement that the current Administration has problems following its own rules - but, then, most Administrations run into that problem. Our government is designed with checks and balances, and practically everyone tries to get away with stuff. It's not that either side has gone bonkers, it's just that the side in power gets the criticism levelled on it. If they can't handle it, then they shouldn't have (a) run for office, (b) accepted the appointment, or (c) taken a government job.