I can understand suing Sony and why the media is blaming Sony for all of this, but why aren't people in the security community blasting Microsoft for making autorun a default operation that, at least in Windows XP, can only be disabled by editing registry entries? If Microsoft was doing their job as an OS provider and not actively discouraging users from disabling autorun, a trojan like this one would be a lot harder to distribute.
"Instead, the world repeatedly sees CNN images of burning cars and shops, he said."
Apparently this guy hasn't been watching CNN too much - I've seen several on-the-street interviews with French immigrants and Muslims explaining why so many of them are angry, and how it lead to the rioting.
"...yet no case defining the amount of control a school has over a student based on that student's web speech has come before the Supreme Court."
That is because, in the vast majority of these cases, the schools involved are private, not public, institutions, and thus they are completely free to limit student speech as they see fit.
"If Bush were serious about interplanetary flight he'd start construction of a nuclear powered space-only ship, with a hefty lander, using ISS as the assembly plant."
Are you on crack? The ISS was built to be a research station, not an assembly plant for massive vehicles. Building ships in space would require a new sort of space station entirely.
"Uh, wait, I thought file-sharing technology was used for a variety of things."
It is, but not on Grokster. That was the whole point of the lawsuits - that Grokster had no business model beyond serving up advertisements to people while they downloaded copyrighted media.
Trojans require the user to actively install them, thus the name. This one installs on its own, without the user doing anything but inserting the CD, which makes it a virus.
I've rarely seen cube farms without locking drawers that can be used for storing anything sensitive. When I was doing admin work I usually had corporate officers lock all that stuff up in an eight-hour fire safe, because I knew that just locking it up in my office wasn't enough to stop a determined theif, fire, flood, etc..
Online classes are great for two kinds of people: 1. Lazy students who can't be bothered to show up for and participate in a real class. 2. Bad professors who can't lecture worth a damn.
Also, if you have trouble understanding professors from other countries who speak in thick accents, online classes are even worse, because the sound quality on streaming video lectures is usually horrible, and many times those professors write so poorly that it's harder to figure out their forum posts than their spoken words.
"In this case, the US is meddling in the affairs of everyone else by controlling the name servers that everyone uses."
The United States never forced any other nation to use our name servers, nor did the United States ever force those nations to connect themselves to our WAN. When other nations connected to the internet they did so voluntarily, and if they don't like the way our government chooses to manage our WAN, those nations are just as free to stop using ours - for that matter, they're free to just set up their own name servers connected to our WAN.
What it really comes down to is that decades after the US had the internet working, the rest of the world still couldn't pull off something similar. UN can't even agree that it should make some sort of serious effort to stop genocide in Africa, the damage all those corrupt diplomats would do to the internet if put in charge is unthinkable. Perhaps if those whiners in the EU could get their own constitution ratified by the member states the US would have a good reason to care about Europe's desire to have more control over the internet, but right now there's no evidence that letting other nations have more control over the internet would do anything but ruin it.
The success of the iPod is a combination of design based on intense market research and never-ending advertising campaigns. Apple's firmware is buggy which makes it crash prone, and anyone who has dealt with a staticky iPod Mini knows that they can't design a circuitboard very well, so it seems unlikely that any amount of open-source technical ingenuity will beat the iPod.
Developers don't add network support to PS2 games because the PS2 does not have a standard ethernet port - to get ethernet one has to buy an additional network device, which sells for $40 - about four times the cost of a decent ethernet adapter for a PC. This has lead to a very small installed base for the PS2 network adapter, so developers have little to gain from supporting it.
With the PS3 the situation is entirely reversed - the system has built-in networking capabilities, and, unlike the Xbox 360, will not require users to subscribe to an online gaming service. By not requiring users to subscribe, Sony creates a larger player base, and frees developers from being trapped in the proprietary world of a central service, meaning that developers have a GREATER incentive to develop network content for the PS3 than for the Xbox 360.
"Who makes the decision that a work was "never intended to have [a] specifically limited run[]"
The artist does - for example, one-of-a-kind paintings and sculptures, or prints clearly labled as being one in a limited series. In such cases it should be obvious that a limited, one-time print run was intended, and artists who support themselves by producing limited-availability works should be protected by the "it was out of print" defense.
Oh how I do concur! There are far too many books, movies, and audio recordings languishing in cultural limbo for just that reason, and the governments of the world are greatly remiss in not creating a copyright exemption for out-of-print items that were never intended to have specifically limited runs. It is of course worst for movies, hundreds if not thousands of which are being lost forever because the original prints expire before the copyrights.
"I wonder how big China will have to get before they realize that it's hopeless to control information."
The Chinese government does a pretty good job controlling information, because they have no compunction about imprisoning and killing people who spread information that they don't like.
"I don't think human biology will allow for that apathy about the world though."
You apparently aren't living on planet earth, where nations around the world pitched in to help the United States preemptively attack Iraq based on Iraqi weapons that didn't exist. Or where recent genocide in the Sudan lead to hundreds of thousands of murders because other nations didn't want to deal with diplomatic flack from China, which supplies weapons to both sides in most African conflicts.
Most people I know who are still doing the Linux thing either think that this is 2001 and Linux is still cool, or they simply haven't seen OS X in action yet.
This must be the best idea for encouraging Windows piracy I've ever heard. All the software Microsoft sells is already available on the street for pennies in South Korea, those bootleg vendors will do even better if they don't have competition from legit software vendors.
So many points stated so well. I'm essentially done with PC gaming for the same reasons as you - overpriced hardware, uninspired design, and not wanting to be bothered with returning a game that I didn't pirate because the latest copy protection tools are incompatible with my "new" DVD drives (Which are one and three years old) so I can't play without using cracks that keep me from playing online.
What I don't understand is WHY Microsoft is trying to push PC gaming. It's not like Apple is competing in that arena, and the whole point of the Xbox seems to have been saving us all from the hell that PC gaming had become, so why are they bothering? Is it just to hinder any screwball antitrust suits that might come from pissed of PC game makers that don't want to do Xbox games?
I don't think anyone's underestimating what Microsoft is doing, I think that most people just don't care - I certainly don't. I've seen at least a dozen bad search engines come and go because they tried too hard to do too much and be too cool, instead of just doing things simply and well. Microsoft needs to stop trying to beat Google, build a search engine that doesn't suck at doing simple web searching, and then add to it. Of course, they don't get that, and they probably have ten teams working on tend search projects and an eleventh team trying to kludge it all together, which is why Microsoft will never have a good search engine.
"Out of the PS3 and the XBOX 360, only one has a shot of playing HD video; HDCP (High Definition Copy Protection) only supports digital output (i.e. HDMI/DVI)."
Given Sony's record with DVD playback on the PS2, it's a pretty safe bet that the DVD playback on the PS3 with be plagued with bugs. Despite multiple revisions, the PS2 still has trouble with simple things like layer transitions, chapter changes, and video/audio artifacts during playback. If Sony can't even fix those simple things - things that Chinese manufacturers with far smaller budgets and few skilled laborers can do - it's a safe bet that the PS3 is going to suck for movie playback.
I can understand why the tickets weren't selling - it's all music from new games that aren't particularly well-known for their music. If they wanted to do symphonic renditions of game music, they should have picked great game soundtracks and done arrangements of those, instead of just picking a lot of recent top-selling game soundtracks that few people ever noticed in the first place.
If you don't like the rules, don't play the damned game. The rules are there for the majority of customers who would rather not have their fantasy role-playing invaded by jackasses who think it's cute to come up with a name innappropriate to the game setting. If you can't manage to play a game without using a lame name, go back to games like Diablo and Counterstrike.
What makes you think that the manager behind this nutty idea is thinking? I'm guessing that any manager cranking out this kind of cracked idea is both clueless and stupid.
"...Minivans are about as bad as many SUVs as far as MPG- why they get a free pass, I'll never know..."
Minivans get a pass because people who drive them do so out of necessity, while most SUV buyers get them as a status symbol. When was the last time you saw someone driving around town, alone, in a Luxury-branded minivan with 20 inch magnesium wheels? The minivan is a sign of dedicated parents willing to drive a car that handles like a yacht, while an SUV is a sign of some asshole dumping money into a depreciating asset.
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"A man is (supposed to be) innocent until proven guilty."
Not outside of the USA. And even the USA only applies that one to citizens.
I can understand suing Sony and why the media is blaming Sony for all of this, but why aren't people in the security community blasting Microsoft for making autorun a default operation that, at least in Windows XP, can only be disabled by editing registry entries? If Microsoft was doing their job as an OS provider and not actively discouraging users from disabling autorun, a trojan like this one would be a lot harder to distribute.
"Instead, the world repeatedly sees CNN images of burning cars and shops, he said."
Apparently this guy hasn't been watching CNN too much - I've seen several on-the-street interviews with French immigrants and Muslims explaining why so many of them are angry, and how it lead to the rioting.
"...yet no case defining the amount of control a school has over a student based on that student's web speech has come before the Supreme Court."
That is because, in the vast majority of these cases, the schools involved are private, not public, institutions, and thus they are completely free to limit student speech as they see fit.
"If Bush were serious about interplanetary flight he'd start construction of a nuclear powered space-only ship, with a hefty lander, using ISS as the assembly plant."
Are you on crack? The ISS was built to be a research station, not an assembly plant for massive vehicles. Building ships in space would require a new sort of space station entirely.
"Uh, wait, I thought file-sharing technology was used for a variety of things."
It is, but not on Grokster. That was the whole point of the lawsuits - that Grokster had no business model beyond serving up advertisements to people while they downloaded copyrighted media.
Given the games likely to be available at release, I don't see how the shortage is a bad thing. What am I going to miss out on?
"That makes it a trojan."
Trojans require the user to actively install them, thus the name. This one installs on its own, without the user doing anything but inserting the CD, which makes it a virus.
I've rarely seen cube farms without locking drawers that can be used for storing anything sensitive. When I was doing admin work I usually had corporate officers lock all that stuff up in an eight-hour fire safe, because I knew that just locking it up in my office wasn't enough to stop a determined theif, fire, flood, etc..
Online classes are great for two kinds of people:
1. Lazy students who can't be bothered to show up for and participate in a real class.
2. Bad professors who can't lecture worth a damn.
Also, if you have trouble understanding professors from other countries who speak in thick accents, online classes are even worse, because the sound quality on streaming video lectures is usually horrible, and many times those professors write so poorly that it's harder to figure out their forum posts than their spoken words.
"In this case, the US is meddling in the affairs of everyone else by controlling the name servers that everyone uses."
The United States never forced any other nation to use our name servers, nor did the United States ever force those nations to connect themselves to our WAN. When other nations connected to the internet they did so voluntarily, and if they don't like the way our government chooses to manage our WAN, those nations are just as free to stop using ours - for that matter, they're free to just set up their own name servers connected to our WAN.
What it really comes down to is that decades after the US had the internet working, the rest of the world still couldn't pull off something similar. UN can't even agree that it should make some sort of serious effort to stop genocide in Africa, the damage all those corrupt diplomats would do to the internet if put in charge is unthinkable. Perhaps if those whiners in the EU could get their own constitution ratified by the member states the US would have a good reason to care about Europe's desire to have more control over the internet, but right now there's no evidence that letting other nations have more control over the internet would do anything but ruin it.
The success of the iPod is a combination of design based on intense market research and never-ending advertising campaigns. Apple's firmware is buggy which makes it crash prone, and anyone who has dealt with a staticky iPod Mini knows that they can't design a circuitboard very well, so it seems unlikely that any amount of open-source technical ingenuity will beat the iPod.
Developers don't add network support to PS2 games because the PS2 does not have a standard ethernet port - to get ethernet one has to buy an additional network device, which sells for $40 - about four times the cost of a decent ethernet adapter for a PC. This has lead to a very small installed base for the PS2 network adapter, so developers have little to gain from supporting it.
With the PS3 the situation is entirely reversed - the system has built-in networking capabilities, and, unlike the Xbox 360, will not require users to subscribe to an online gaming service. By not requiring users to subscribe, Sony creates a larger player base, and frees developers from being trapped in the proprietary world of a central service, meaning that developers have a GREATER incentive to develop network content for the PS3 than for the Xbox 360.
"Who makes the decision that a work was "never intended to have [a] specifically limited run[]"
The artist does - for example, one-of-a-kind paintings and sculptures, or prints clearly labled as being one in a limited series. In such cases it should be obvious that a limited, one-time print run was intended, and artists who support themselves by producing limited-availability works should be protected by the "it was out of print" defense.
Oh how I do concur! There are far too many books, movies, and audio recordings languishing in cultural limbo for just that reason, and the governments of the world are greatly remiss in not creating a copyright exemption for out-of-print items that were never intended to have specifically limited runs. It is of course worst for movies, hundreds if not thousands of which are being lost forever because the original prints expire before the copyrights.
"I wonder how big China will have to get before they realize that it's hopeless to control information."
The Chinese government does a pretty good job controlling information, because they have no compunction about imprisoning and killing people who spread information that they don't like.
"I don't think human biology will allow for that apathy about the world though."
You apparently aren't living on planet earth, where nations around the world pitched in to help the United States preemptively attack Iraq based on Iraqi weapons that didn't exist. Or where recent genocide in the Sudan lead to hundreds of thousands of murders because other nations didn't want to deal with diplomatic flack from China, which supplies weapons to both sides in most African conflicts.
Most people I know who are still doing the Linux thing either think that this is 2001 and Linux is still cool, or they simply haven't seen OS X in action yet.
This must be the best idea for encouraging Windows piracy I've ever heard. All the software Microsoft sells is already available on the street for pennies in South Korea, those bootleg vendors will do even better if they don't have competition from legit software vendors.
So many points stated so well. I'm essentially done with PC gaming for the same reasons as you - overpriced hardware, uninspired design, and not wanting to be bothered with returning a game that I didn't pirate because the latest copy protection tools are incompatible with my "new" DVD drives (Which are one and three years old) so I can't play without using cracks that keep me from playing online.
What I don't understand is WHY Microsoft is trying to push PC gaming. It's not like Apple is competing in that arena, and the whole point of the Xbox seems to have been saving us all from the hell that PC gaming had become, so why are they bothering? Is it just to hinder any screwball antitrust suits that might come from pissed of PC game makers that don't want to do Xbox games?
I don't think anyone's underestimating what Microsoft is doing, I think that most people just don't care - I certainly don't. I've seen at least a dozen bad search engines come and go because they tried too hard to do too much and be too cool, instead of just doing things simply and well. Microsoft needs to stop trying to beat Google, build a search engine that doesn't suck at doing simple web searching, and then add to it. Of course, they don't get that, and they probably have ten teams working on tend search projects and an eleventh team trying to kludge it all together, which is why Microsoft will never have a good search engine.
"Out of the PS3 and the XBOX 360, only one has a shot of playing HD video; HDCP (High Definition Copy Protection) only supports digital output (i.e. HDMI/DVI)."
Given Sony's record with DVD playback on the PS2, it's a pretty safe bet that the DVD playback on the PS3 with be plagued with bugs. Despite multiple revisions, the PS2 still has trouble with simple things like layer transitions, chapter changes, and video/audio artifacts during playback. If Sony can't even fix those simple things - things that Chinese manufacturers with far smaller budgets and few skilled laborers can do - it's a safe bet that the PS3 is going to suck for movie playback.
I can understand why the tickets weren't selling - it's all music from new games that aren't particularly well-known for their music. If they wanted to do symphonic renditions of game music, they should have picked great game soundtracks and done arrangements of those, instead of just picking a lot of recent top-selling game soundtracks that few people ever noticed in the first place.
If you don't like the rules, don't play the damned game. The rules are there for the majority of customers who would rather not have their fantasy role-playing invaded by jackasses who think it's cute to come up with a name innappropriate to the game setting. If you can't manage to play a game without using a lame name, go back to games like Diablo and Counterstrike.
"...what your management was thinking."
What makes you think that the manager behind this nutty idea is thinking? I'm guessing that any manager cranking out this kind of cracked idea is both clueless and stupid.
"...Minivans are about as bad as many SUVs as far as MPG- why they get a free pass, I'll never know..."
Minivans get a pass because people who drive them do so out of necessity, while most SUV buyers get them as a status symbol. When was the last time you saw someone driving around town, alone, in a Luxury-branded minivan with 20 inch magnesium wheels? The minivan is a sign of dedicated parents willing to drive a car that handles like a yacht, while an SUV is a sign of some asshole dumping money into a depreciating asset.