As a consumer, what is the advantage for me of using Tray and Pray? I have a degree in CS, but my six year old cousin can accomplish the install process on most major computer game releases -- put in disk, hit enter four times, click "play" on the screen that pops up every time she puts the disk in. Is it THAT difficult to deal with the hazards of configuring a Windows product which is designed to sell to upwards of 100,000 15-25 year olds?
As a developer, what is my incentive for using this? It means, from my very first brainstorming session, I have to design my game around loading from optical media. Yay. So instead of using a resource which is cheap and abundant to me (other people's disk space), I get to use a really expensive resource (programmer and designer time) trying to figure out how to re-invent simple wheels like "How do I load the 64 MB textures for an expansive level in under 15 seconds?" (Traditional answer: cache them, you fool, not spend months of dev time trying to make sure level geometry restricts the local set of resources enough that I can stream all the ones I need off the disk as we play, a trick that VERY few games manage to get right). Does it make it less likely for my game to get pirated/more likely for me to collect my royalty-check? Come on, I'm an intelligent computer professional, I know there will be a CD image which uses the load code which I have sweat blood for to boostrap the game off an arbitrary bit of optical media within two weeks, and probably two days, of release (if I manage to not lose any late-betas to the slimeball journalists I send them to). Does it discourage the casual "share the game with a friend" pirate? Not much more than the current "force people to play with CD in the drive until they do a google search" method does. Whee, the circumvention isn't going to be "Run crack.exe", its going to be "Run crack.exe, and then follow the next instructions to burn your own disc/boot from the hard drive".
As a publisher, what is my incentive to use this technology? Its not a bullet point I can tout. Motion-captured video is a bullet-point I can tout. NBA players names is a bullet-point I can tout. Bullet-time, a movie tie-in, that fabled beast called "gameplay", all of these I can hype. Who will pay me money to get to put their CD in and play GeeWhiz2005 instantly who wouldn't play GeeWhiz2005 already? Nobody.
This technology is capable in the status quo. Nobody uses it, because nobody has an incentive to. MS backing it won't change that.
Take your pick of a (human) language which is not Western European. How many unemployed engineers are there who can program better than you? Lots. How many unemployed engineers are there that can program better than you... and know enough of a foreign language to code programs which either target that population or use assumptions of that language? Not very many, at all.
Besides the obvious government agencies (there is a reason I picked those five languages -- you will seriously by hired the same day your security check passes if you combine CS with any of the five), natural language research, localization/internationalization (something the OSS community could really, really use at the moment by the way), etc, etc, etc.
See, for example:
Airlines and hotels routinely charge seventeen rates for service which is objectively identical at the same day (for example, rooms 4501 and 4503 which are the same in every way might be getting $120 and $70 a night depending on how much the hotel thinks they can get from that customer -- hint, don't look like you're a business traveller).
Use of coupons allows price-discrimination between low-income and high-income shoppers -- high-income shoppers choose not to clip coupons, which is a time-consuming activity where you essentially value your time at $8 an hour or so.
Mail order companies routinely sell exactly the same product to different customers at different prices. Its legal and widely known in the industry, although of course we don't advertise this fact to the people who are being charged more (we certainly do to the people who are being charged less!) For example, if you are a customer of a hypothetical Paperclips Inc, and you buy a 12-pack of hypothetical CIB Pens in one of their brick and mortar stores, you pay approximately $2. If you buy it from their website, $1.80. If you buy it from a particular subsidiary (same pen, same fulfillment center, different name on the shipping carton), $1.65. If you buy it from that subsidiary's educational catalog (we only mail it to schools -- same pen, same fulfillment center, same name on the carton, different item number in your order sheet but hashes to same item number in our database), $1.50. If you buy it from their Summer Blowout Special flyer, $1.55. If you are the Big City Public Schools, $1.20 because otherwise one of Paperclip's competitors would have outbid them.
Oh, sure, you CAN sue -- good luck trying to find a lawyer to take the case, because it will be laughed out of court.
HL is pretty good on both counts: Gordon Freeman, MIT graduate materials physicist (with glasses!), and Alyx, the only female in a video game who has EVER been genuinely attractive (as opposed to having more silica compounds in her body than the average island nation has on its beaches).
The big change in WoW from lvl 20 to lvl 60 is that you spend increasing amounts of your time in instances, which is an entirely different ballgame than solo grinding or grouped with one buddy hunting +2s (an enemy two levels tougher than you). Instances, especially the first time or three you go in, are just a 2-4 hour long session of pure gaming goodness and the tactics you use are completely different than what you do in small-group situations. They're also good loot and fairly decent XP, although I think with the amount of time most people spend waiting around before they go in you can probably grind faster.
If women would routinely accept a lower salary to the same job, why hasn't some enterprising company started outsourcing to them? Cut a third off your employment costs instantly and with no headaches -- what kind of capitalist would pass that up? It would be like having India in your timezone with no communication issues -- there wouldn't be a man left working in IT.
Conclusion: there probably aren't that many opportunities to pick up 100% of the goods at 67% of the price.
1. Sell through mom&pop stores for 50% of retail. Make $20 per siege tank.
2. Cannibalize sales by undercutting mom&pop stores, killing market. Make $15 per siege tank, until market dies.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Amen, especially to that last part. It cost me the equivalent of over 100 American dollars to import WoW to Japan, and you don't even want to know the hoops you have to jump through to get a payment mechanism which will work for their monthly fee. Half-Life 2 was available instantly, without payment hassles, and no worries about whether I would be able to get through the mandatory registration after paying for it (good luck trying to return a game from overseas, by the way).
I love WoW but HL2 is definately the way to go for us minor overseas markets (and it was even partially translated! Amazing!).
I got assigned to do that at the job once. Had a list of sixty names to "establish minimum security for" and a list of other projects which interested me more. I could quite a few people on "password", "pa$$word", $loginID, and the other usual candidates, but I didn't even have enough time to run a proper dictionary attack on them all. And you know why?
Because I'm a REALLY CRUDDY approximation of the average adversary. My incentive was "get stupid project over as quickly as possible", his is "gain access by any means necessary". How many highly-paid staff are you going to detail to this password-cracking project, which extends onward, indefinately? How many man-hours go down the hole? At best, and I mean at best, I spent a week of the company's money securing sixty people against the dumbest rung of script kiddies for another sixty days (password reset) -- was that a good use of anyone's time? An interested adversary would have owned the heck out of probably half of those users. But few organizations have the resources to pay very expensive people to constantly imitate an interested adversary.
Its MUCH more efficient in terms of engineer-time and corporate management to establish a policy equivalent to whatever resources you were about to throw at the cracking, and possibly code (once!) a verification against that policy (i.e. check when password is set that it doesn't appear in your dictionary and isn't within the bounds your white-hats were about to brute-force check).
If they're so sure of this, just pick any level of statistical deviance they think is significant enough to be an example of the universal consciousness flaring up, and syndicate it to an RSS feed saying "Fair warning to world: somebody, somewhere, is going to get Six Sigma screwed in an indefinite period of time from now". Granted, it wouldn't do much about the possibility of 20-20 hindsights to match the prediction, but at least it wouldn't be correctly post-dicting, which is trivial.
If the protesters get as savaged by your digital creations as they do when they release all those wonderfully cute fur-bearing critters which are actually vicious face-clawing killers . That would be a pretty good indicator of success. And a socially valuable success, too.;)
Thats just as unlikely, though. Unless you're mutating the entire codebase of the virus (which is unweildy and sort of silly), there will be at least some portion of it which has an invariant signature, which is vulnerable to all the standard virus-scanner smackdowns a hand-coded virus is vulnerable to. For one thing, it has to have a mutation engine, which will crash and burn almost instantaneously if you start making random changes in it (lesson #1 of a-life research: don't let the a-life expand into the simulator's code unless you really like cleaning up core dumps).
A-life works very, very poorly as virus material. A virus has essentially three parts: propagation mechanism, an attack vector, and a payload. None of these can be efficiently evolved.
Take the attack vector, for an example. Unless its a trojan, the virus needs to be able to exploit a vulnerability in an existing piece of software. Lets assume, for example, there is some service running on some port which is vulnerable to a buffer overrun under certain conditions. What are the odds of a randomly generated attack string triggering that buffer overrun? Very, vanishingly small. Unless you're willing to push a finger on the evolutionary scales and weight it towards known vulnerabilities (in which case you're better off just writing the vector code, as it will likely be faster and more efficient), you'll never successfully generate an infection.
Take www.ant-wars.com as an example. I wrote a genetic algorithms library for evolving ants. They're finite state machines with about 15 possible instructions and a really, really clear successful strategy (find food, carry back to base) -- and even that is really, hideously hard to do with a-life.
"Polymorphic"/randomly mutating viruses/viruses capable of non-trivial "evolution" are a great plot concept for a science fiction novel and also a great marketing tool for security companies, but in terms of real life impact they're negligible next to any other security threat.
You don't know how much the government would just LOVE as many criminals as possible to start using industrial strength encryption. In the status quo, they might be afraid of having their mail snooped -- but "encryption makes me secure!" has this funny way of suckering people into introducing other security vulnerabilities and eliminating much more secure practices (like discussing truly important things *in person*, a tactic which requires a lot more effort to circumvent than just encryption).
You're the state. You've got coercive process and people with guns. Listing all the ways you can defeat encryption without breaking it would take you all afternoon. Sample:
1. Arrest known accomplice (on non-encrypted legitimate evidence), get him to divulge key or, even better, contents of message. "Look, Billy, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. We saw you do the handoff. We've read the mail, and we know Jimmy wanted to sell you 100 lbs of crack. Just tell us where the other 98 lbs went, and or we're going to let the feds indict you" "Man, thats "#%#$! It was only two pounds! I can prove it" "Really, Billy, why should we believe you?" "I've still got the offer in my inbox! Here!"
2. All emails are 2 way communications. Seize the computer of a known accomplice too stupid to use encryption, blammo, full records of the entire correspondance.
3. Social engineering. Remember the story that some people are willing to give up their password for a chocolate bar? What do you think they're willing to give up to avoid a ten year prison sentence?
4. Move away from the "break communication to use as evidence" paradigm to the "use encryption as a method for identifying suspects" paradigm. Embezzlement happened at a corporation with 1,000 employees? Splendid, 1k suspects. Investigate your conventional leads, if that doesn't pan out, ask the corporation for email logs and devote most of your resources to the ones using encryption. That will be, what, four people on average?
5. Stings. "Yo, man, I ain't got no time for this cryptic "#%"#. You want this rock or not? My IM is DruggDealaz, msg me by 5:00 or I'll find someone else."
Or, see any episode of Law & Order -- world's best manual on applied police procedure:)
Unfortunately, having a J.D. doesn't give you a sudden rush of magical insight into Supreme Court decisions. If it did, there wouldn't be a *loser on every single Constitutional motion*. But there is. Judging truth of argumentation by credentials is, well, pretty bloody stupid (doubly so in an adversarial system), but if you absolutely must have somebody with an impressive title to interpret the case for you, you can go takeyourpick.
Any of those three articles gets into the actual legal issues raised better than TFA, probably because they can't make money by flimflamming you.
Morales holds that a dog discovering prescence of contraband (i.e. pot) doesn't implicate Fourth Amendment concerns for two reasons. Number one, "dogs are really reliable" (this is, well, pretty controversial). Number two, and here is the kicker, there is *no legitimate Constitutional interest in possessing pot*.
Speech about illegal activity, however, or fiction written about illegal activity, or speech regarding the need to zealously prosecute illegal activity, or examples of illegal activity which will trigger the Great Firewall of America, are all constitutionally protected. Even accepting that your magic black box language-scanning solution picks up only references to actual narcotics and not granny discussing her pill prescription, since there is a liberty interest involved in discussing illegal things (as opposed to *possessing* them) the Constitution protects your interest in doing it privately, EVEN IF you make the absurd logical leap to say that your magical black-box method will only fire off of discussions of illegal drugs (statement of which would cause us natural language researchers to collapse in fits of laughter).
Its not "the whole software". They're being ordered to destroy unsold stocks of their existing (infringing) versions -- they are free to patch, update, and support as normal and can release a new version if they remove the offending feature. The order to destroy unsold infringing product is routine in IP cases (whether trademark, copyright, or patent) and will be stayed until their legal wrangling is completely settled. In the event that they look likely to lose their case, they will probably negotiate a settlement with Matsushita promising to never use the feature again and "grandfather" in their existing versions, in addition to paying restitution. Think of it as a court-ordered limited license agreement.
Here are four reasons why developers would rationally want to avoid monetizing their gold supply:
1. Establishing an equivalency between real world currency and gold/Archmages Robes of the Eagle/Swords of P0wning invites real world courts and governments to see gold/robes/swords as tangible property. This would lead to a couple of things: taxes, first of all. If every time Onyxia gets capped $150 of virtual goods spawns in Irvine California, sooner or later the CA IRS is going to wonder "Say, where are our income taxes from independent contractor Onyxia?" How long do you think any taxman is going to let a multi-million a year revenue stream go uncounted? Second, if I *own* my little 30 kb that describes the state of my WoW character and Blizzard decides to nerf my Sword of P0wning I could theoretically sue them for taking away my property interest in the Sword. Currently, their EULA protects them (they say its ALL their IP), but if they allow the IP to be bought and sold they can no more expropriate the goodness of my sword than my ISP can arbitrarily delete content off my professional website.
2. More farmers might mean more monthly income, but the developers will never see a penny of it. It just means there is more gold/items floating in the game than they planned for, possibly bursting their sinks, and thats a problem. For one, it will impoverish non-farming players, because as inflation increases the price of finished goods/endgame content the price of "vendor trash", coin, and static quest rewards will not increase, seeing a drop in the virtual "real wealth" of the casual players -- who aren't going to pay $15 a month just to be lvl 40 Serfs.
3. Some players are morally offended by the idea that their "fun" is being corrupted, and regardless of whether you think they're hypocrites, off balance, or whatever, their $15 a month is as green as everyone else's and they will gladly take it elsewhere. Most developers think that this segment of their playerbase buys more months of service than the "farming community", and they're likely correct.
4. Buying upper-level content means content gets exhausted faster, which could increase the churn rate of the same very interested customers the developers are most happy to keep in the system (both because they typically play games for a long time and because they provide structure to the playerbase via guilds/etc, increasing newbie retention and generating "content" for other players via social interaction, guild rivalries, etc).
I've got a modest proposal to stop phishing -- ASCII should remedy the bug in their standard and unify the 1 and l characters into one canonical representation, since they're identical under most fonts. This has empirically caused FAR more problems than the cross-character set vulnerabilities described.
Oh, wait, that would be stupid, for the exact same reasons. They're NOT the same glyph, they have different meanings (which software likes to know about, every once in a while), the change would break huge number of legacy applications... need I go on? Even the inclusion of Latin glyphs outside the 00 codepage in Unicode was done for a reason -- hankaku/zenkaku characters are critical to backwards compatibility with several Japanese standards and if force both hankaku and zenkaku L to ASCII L many applications, including several which are sort of key around my office, will break. The fact that software should treat a zenkaku L as a zenkaku L, which follows, say, text formatting rules VERY DIFFERENTLY than the Latin L sitting right next to it (even though they might strike you as looking pretty similar, and your browser might decide to render them identically), needs to be associated with the character.
Both the Japanese and the Chinese have been able to understand English letters and numbers as a common part of their languages for a long time now, as well as being able to pronounce them roughly correctly (given the respective sets of phonemes of the languages).
You are just plain wrong with respect to China. With respect to Japan, yep, the majority of the population can make sense of romaji (Western character set), although it gives many older Japanese a bit of a problem. Its funny, on the one hand web-accessibility is making it possible to get your favorite newspaper in a format possible to read without eyesight -- but if you ARE sighted, you need to be able to phonetically spell out the name of your local newspaper in a foreign language.
Compare it to Americans and Spanish. Everyone in the US might not speak Spanish, but we all understand the vowel sounds, right? Can you write a Spanish bastardization of "New York Times" without having to consciously think about it? No. Are you confident that your bastardization will collide correctly with the official bastardization? No. There are no less than three common ways to spell the capital of Japan, and the only reason most Japanese know why its Tokyo and not Toukyou or Tokio is because that word is common enough to be standardized. Its rather harder to predict a word that the rest of the world hasn't romanized for you, like Chuo Shinbun (Chuou, Chuuou, Chuo, Shinbun, Shimbun -- simple combinatorics gets you 6 possibilities for their URL right there).
I don't think anyone on slashdot should be casting stones about "really geeky" anybody. If anything, you should be saying the otaku are insufficiently geeky.
Slashdot Mirror
As a consumer, what is the advantage for me of using Tray and Pray? I have a degree in CS, but my six year old cousin can accomplish the install process on most major computer game releases -- put in disk, hit enter four times, click "play" on the screen that pops up every time she puts the disk in. Is it THAT difficult to deal with the hazards of configuring a Windows product which is designed to sell to upwards of 100,000 15-25 year olds?
As a developer, what is my incentive for using this? It means, from my very first brainstorming session, I have to design my game around loading from optical media. Yay. So instead of using a resource which is cheap and abundant to me (other people's disk space), I get to use a really expensive resource (programmer and designer time) trying to figure out how to re-invent simple wheels like "How do I load the 64 MB textures for an expansive level in under 15 seconds?" (Traditional answer: cache them, you fool, not spend months of dev time trying to make sure level geometry restricts the local set of resources enough that I can stream all the ones I need off the disk as we play, a trick that VERY few games manage to get right). Does it make it less likely for my game to get pirated/more likely for me to collect my royalty-check? Come on, I'm an intelligent computer professional, I know there will be a CD image which uses the load code which I have sweat blood for to boostrap the game off an arbitrary bit of optical media within two weeks, and probably two days, of release (if I manage to not lose any late-betas to the slimeball journalists I send them to). Does it discourage the casual "share the game with a friend" pirate? Not much more than the current "force people to play with CD in the drive until they do a google search" method does. Whee, the circumvention isn't going to be "Run crack.exe", its going to be "Run crack.exe, and then follow the next instructions to burn your own disc/boot from the hard drive".
As a publisher, what is my incentive to use this technology? Its not a bullet point I can tout. Motion-captured video is a bullet-point I can tout. NBA players names is a bullet-point I can tout. Bullet-time, a movie tie-in, that fabled beast called "gameplay", all of these I can hype. Who will pay me money to get to put their CD in and play GeeWhiz2005 instantly who wouldn't play GeeWhiz2005 already? Nobody.
This technology is capable in the status quo. Nobody uses it, because nobody has an incentive to. MS backing it won't change that.
Take your pick of a (human) language which is not Western European. How many unemployed engineers are there who can program better than you? Lots. How many unemployed engineers are there that can program better than you... and know enough of a foreign language to code programs which either target that population or use assumptions of that language? Not very many, at all. Besides the obvious government agencies (there is a reason I picked those five languages -- you will seriously by hired the same day your security check passes if you combine CS with any of the five), natural language research, localization/internationalization (something the OSS community could really, really use at the moment by the way), etc, etc, etc.
In the Soviet Union, fairies tail you!
See, for example: Airlines and hotels routinely charge seventeen rates for service which is objectively identical at the same day (for example, rooms 4501 and 4503 which are the same in every way might be getting $120 and $70 a night depending on how much the hotel thinks they can get from that customer -- hint, don't look like you're a business traveller). Use of coupons allows price-discrimination between low-income and high-income shoppers -- high-income shoppers choose not to clip coupons, which is a time-consuming activity where you essentially value your time at $8 an hour or so. Mail order companies routinely sell exactly the same product to different customers at different prices. Its legal and widely known in the industry, although of course we don't advertise this fact to the people who are being charged more (we certainly do to the people who are being charged less!) For example, if you are a customer of a hypothetical Paperclips Inc, and you buy a 12-pack of hypothetical CIB Pens in one of their brick and mortar stores, you pay approximately $2. If you buy it from their website, $1.80. If you buy it from a particular subsidiary (same pen, same fulfillment center, different name on the shipping carton), $1.65. If you buy it from that subsidiary's educational catalog (we only mail it to schools -- same pen, same fulfillment center, same name on the carton, different item number in your order sheet but hashes to same item number in our database), $1.50. If you buy it from their Summer Blowout Special flyer, $1.55. If you are the Big City Public Schools, $1.20 because otherwise one of Paperclip's competitors would have outbid them. Oh, sure, you CAN sue -- good luck trying to find a lawyer to take the case, because it will be laughed out of court.
HL is pretty good on both counts: Gordon Freeman, MIT graduate materials physicist (with glasses!), and Alyx, the only female in a video game who has EVER been genuinely attractive (as opposed to having more silica compounds in her body than the average island nation has on its beaches).
The big change in WoW from lvl 20 to lvl 60 is that you spend increasing amounts of your time in instances, which is an entirely different ballgame than solo grinding or grouped with one buddy hunting +2s (an enemy two levels tougher than you). Instances, especially the first time or three you go in, are just a 2-4 hour long session of pure gaming goodness and the tactics you use are completely different than what you do in small-group situations. They're also good loot and fairly decent XP, although I think with the amount of time most people spend waiting around before they go in you can probably grind faster.
Conclusion: there probably aren't that many opportunities to pick up 100% of the goods at 67% of the price.
1. Sell through mom&pop stores for 50% of retail. Make $20 per siege tank. 2. Cannibalize sales by undercutting mom&pop stores, killing market. Make $15 per siege tank, until market dies. 3. ??? 4. Profit!
I love WoW but HL2 is definately the way to go for us minor overseas markets (and it was even partially translated! Amazing!).
Because I'm a REALLY CRUDDY approximation of the average adversary. My incentive was "get stupid project over as quickly as possible", his is "gain access by any means necessary". How many highly-paid staff are you going to detail to this password-cracking project, which extends onward, indefinately? How many man-hours go down the hole? At best, and I mean at best, I spent a week of the company's money securing sixty people against the dumbest rung of script kiddies for another sixty days (password reset) -- was that a good use of anyone's time? An interested adversary would have owned the heck out of probably half of those users. But few organizations have the resources to pay very expensive people to constantly imitate an interested adversary.
Its MUCH more efficient in terms of engineer-time and corporate management to establish a policy equivalent to whatever resources you were about to throw at the cracking, and possibly code (once!) a verification against that policy (i.e. check when password is set that it doesn't appear in your dictionary and isn't within the bounds your white-hats were about to brute-force check).
If they're so sure of this, just pick any level of statistical deviance they think is significant enough to be an example of the universal consciousness flaring up, and syndicate it to an RSS feed saying "Fair warning to world: somebody, somewhere, is going to get Six Sigma screwed in an indefinite period of time from now". Granted, it wouldn't do much about the possibility of 20-20 hindsights to match the prediction, but at least it wouldn't be correctly post-dicting, which is trivial.
If the protesters get as savaged by your digital creations as they do when they release all those wonderfully cute fur-bearing critters which are actually vicious face-clawing killers . That would be a pretty good indicator of success. And a socially valuable success, too. ;)
Thats just as unlikely, though. Unless you're mutating the entire codebase of the virus (which is unweildy and sort of silly), there will be at least some portion of it which has an invariant signature, which is vulnerable to all the standard virus-scanner smackdowns a hand-coded virus is vulnerable to. For one thing, it has to have a mutation engine, which will crash and burn almost instantaneously if you start making random changes in it (lesson #1 of a-life research: don't let the a-life expand into the simulator's code unless you really like cleaning up core dumps).
Take the attack vector, for an example. Unless its a trojan, the virus needs to be able to exploit a vulnerability in an existing piece of software. Lets assume, for example, there is some service running on some port which is vulnerable to a buffer overrun under certain conditions. What are the odds of a randomly generated attack string triggering that buffer overrun? Very, vanishingly small. Unless you're willing to push a finger on the evolutionary scales and weight it towards known vulnerabilities (in which case you're better off just writing the vector code, as it will likely be faster and more efficient), you'll never successfully generate an infection.
Take www.ant-wars.com as an example. I wrote a genetic algorithms library for evolving ants. They're finite state machines with about 15 possible instructions and a really, really clear successful strategy (find food, carry back to base) -- and even that is really, hideously hard to do with a-life.
"Polymorphic"/randomly mutating viruses/viruses capable of non-trivial "evolution" are a great plot concept for a science fiction novel and also a great marketing tool for security companies, but in terms of real life impact they're negligible next to any other security threat.
You're the state. You've got coercive process and people with guns. Listing all the ways you can defeat encryption without breaking it would take you all afternoon. Sample:
1. Arrest known accomplice (on non-encrypted legitimate evidence), get him to divulge key or, even better, contents of message. "Look, Billy, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. We saw you do the handoff. We've read the mail, and we know Jimmy wanted to sell you 100 lbs of crack. Just tell us where the other 98 lbs went, and or we're going to let the feds indict you" "Man, thats "#%#$! It was only two pounds! I can prove it" "Really, Billy, why should we believe you?" "I've still got the offer in my inbox! Here!"
2. All emails are 2 way communications. Seize the computer of a known accomplice too stupid to use encryption, blammo, full records of the entire correspondance.
3. Social engineering. Remember the story that some people are willing to give up their password for a chocolate bar? What do you think they're willing to give up to avoid a ten year prison sentence?
4. Move away from the "break communication to use as evidence" paradigm to the "use encryption as a method for identifying suspects" paradigm. Embezzlement happened at a corporation with 1,000 employees? Splendid, 1k suspects. Investigate your conventional leads, if that doesn't pan out, ask the corporation for email logs and devote most of your resources to the ones using encryption. That will be, what, four people on average?
5. Stings. "Yo, man, I ain't got no time for this cryptic "#%"#. You want this rock or not? My IM is DruggDealaz, msg me by 5:00 or I'll find someone else."
Or, see any episode of Law & Order -- world's best manual on applied police procedure :)
Any of those three articles gets into the actual legal issues raised better than TFA, probably because they can't make money by flimflamming you.
s/Morales/Caballes . I'm not awake.
Speech about illegal activity, however, or fiction written about illegal activity, or speech regarding the need to zealously prosecute illegal activity, or examples of illegal activity which will trigger the Great Firewall of America, are all constitutionally protected. Even accepting that your magic black box language-scanning solution picks up only references to actual narcotics and not granny discussing her pill prescription, since there is a liberty interest involved in discussing illegal things (as opposed to *possessing* them) the Constitution protects your interest in doing it privately, EVEN IF you make the absurd logical leap to say that your magical black-box method will only fire off of discussions of illegal drugs (statement of which would cause us natural language researchers to collapse in fits of laughter).
Its not "the whole software". They're being ordered to destroy unsold stocks of their existing (infringing) versions -- they are free to patch, update, and support as normal and can release a new version if they remove the offending feature. The order to destroy unsold infringing product is routine in IP cases (whether trademark, copyright, or patent) and will be stayed until their legal wrangling is completely settled. In the event that they look likely to lose their case, they will probably negotiate a settlement with Matsushita promising to never use the feature again and "grandfather" in their existing versions, in addition to paying restitution. Think of it as a court-ordered limited license agreement.
1. Establishing an equivalency between real world currency and gold/Archmages Robes of the Eagle/Swords of P0wning invites real world courts and governments to see gold/robes/swords as tangible property. This would lead to a couple of things: taxes, first of all. If every time Onyxia gets capped $150 of virtual goods spawns in Irvine California, sooner or later the CA IRS is going to wonder "Say, where are our income taxes from independent contractor Onyxia?" How long do you think any taxman is going to let a multi-million a year revenue stream go uncounted? Second, if I *own* my little 30 kb that describes the state of my WoW character and Blizzard decides to nerf my Sword of P0wning I could theoretically sue them for taking away my property interest in the Sword. Currently, their EULA protects them (they say its ALL their IP), but if they allow the IP to be bought and sold they can no more expropriate the goodness of my sword than my ISP can arbitrarily delete content off my professional website.
2. More farmers might mean more monthly income, but the developers will never see a penny of it. It just means there is more gold/items floating in the game than they planned for, possibly bursting their sinks, and thats a problem. For one, it will impoverish non-farming players, because as inflation increases the price of finished goods/endgame content the price of "vendor trash", coin, and static quest rewards will not increase, seeing a drop in the virtual "real wealth" of the casual players -- who aren't going to pay $15 a month just to be lvl 40 Serfs.
3. Some players are morally offended by the idea that their "fun" is being corrupted, and regardless of whether you think they're hypocrites, off balance, or whatever, their $15 a month is as green as everyone else's and they will gladly take it elsewhere. Most developers think that this segment of their playerbase buys more months of service than the "farming community", and they're likely correct.
4. Buying upper-level content means content gets exhausted faster, which could increase the churn rate of the same very interested customers the developers are most happy to keep in the system (both because they typically play games for a long time and because they provide structure to the playerbase via guilds/etc, increasing newbie retention and generating "content" for other players via social interaction, guild rivalries, etc).
It seems they forgot to cast Protect: Redeye before going on the camera shoot. Newbs.
Oh, wait, that would be stupid, for the exact same reasons. They're NOT the same glyph, they have different meanings (which software likes to know about, every once in a while), the change would break huge number of legacy applications... need I go on? Even the inclusion of Latin glyphs outside the 00 codepage in Unicode was done for a reason -- hankaku/zenkaku characters are critical to backwards compatibility with several Japanese standards and if force both hankaku and zenkaku L to ASCII L many applications, including several which are sort of key around my office, will break. The fact that software should treat a zenkaku L as a zenkaku L, which follows, say, text formatting rules VERY DIFFERENTLY than the Latin L sitting right next to it (even though they might strike you as looking pretty similar, and your browser might decide to render them identically), needs to be associated with the character.
Compare it to Americans and Spanish. Everyone in the US might not speak Spanish, but we all understand the vowel sounds, right? Can you write a Spanish bastardization of "New York Times" without having to consciously think about it? No. Are you confident that your bastardization will collide correctly with the official bastardization? No. There are no less than three common ways to spell the capital of Japan, and the only reason most Japanese know why its Tokyo and not Toukyou or Tokio is because that word is common enough to be standardized. Its rather harder to predict a word that the rest of the world hasn't romanized for you, like Chuo Shinbun (Chuou, Chuuou, Chuo, Shinbun, Shimbun -- simple combinatorics gets you 6 possibilities for their URL right there).
I don't think anyone on slashdot should be casting stones about "really geeky" anybody. If anything, you should be saying the otaku are insufficiently geeky.