>I don't think dictionary attacks are subject to emotional impact.
Sigh... so use captials, or one extra punctuation or spelling substitution, or any of the other suggestions in this thread. The *point* being that using an absurd phrase allows you (or Joe Q. User) to remember more words, which makes dictionary attacks (or brute attacks for that matter) exponentially harder, at the same time as making it far less likely that someone would guess your phrase, Hollywood-style. But then, you already knew that, didn't you?
Even using two words would be better and n^2 harder to break than most people ever bother with.
The recently-published 3rd edition of the UNIX System Administration Handbook has a good guide for passphrase selection - which (to stay on-topic) they in turn borrowed from an old version of the PGP Passphrase FAQ. The concept is called "shocking nonsense" - something containing gross, obscene, or otherwise extreme and improbable juxtapositions of ideas. The example they give is: "Mollusks peck my galloping genitals." (No, really - I'm not making this up!) The idea is that the emotional impact of the phrase itself makes it unlikely that an outside individual would ever guess it.
I certainly believe that. I ran into some truly bizarre problems with Turbo Pascal. At one point, I was writing a simple game, and the program kept hard-crashing the computer. Eventually after several reboots, I managed to use the debugger to isolate the statement in the game loop which was crashing. The offending statement was this:
x:= x + 1;
After a seemingly random number of iterations, somewhere between 100-150, the debugger showed this statement as being executed when the PC would crash. Never did get around it. Guess it just goes to show that when it comes to totally bug-free code, you can't trust anything.
> Granted it's supposedly a red dwarf which wouldn't
> give off too much light, but at 1-3 lys away, it should
> show up fairly brightly, I would guess.
There's also the possibility that it is a brown dwarf, barely visible at all. A previously unknown brown dwarf was recently discovered only 13 ly from Earth, purely by chance as I recall.
To me the most fascinating point revealed here is that the judge's ruling values the damages associated with stealing the domain name to be higher than the total revenues earned by the site. Assuming you believe what the business in question is saying - but let's say for a second that you do. That means that the law figures the value of the domain name itself - alone - is worth more than the actual business behind it.
Hmm... admittedly, for a lot of dot-coms that's actually literally true - or at least they probably *paid* more for the domain than they ever earned back. So hey, sure, why not codify that into case law as well? And what a business plan: "Sure, I'll license you to use the name ThisDomain.com next year - in exchange for 105% of the revenues you earn from it. Sound fair?" What a screwed up system.
What's really great about this sort of straw man argument is that you can substitute *practically anything* as the target. Especially techie things. There probably isn't a topic on Slashdot you couldn't troll this way. Isn't that great?
Here's my favorite equivalent:
s/We're/Columbus is/
s/Mars/the New World/
s/billion/million/
s/planets/continents/
s/on Earth/in Europe/
Sigh... as if anyone alive today could still doubt the value of pure scientific research with a straight face. And yet, there it is.
Here's the real NASA site for the Odyssey mission:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/
Of interest:
* Although the spacecraft arrives at Mars in October, it will use the same aerobraking maneuver used by the earlier Mars Global Surveyor, so it won't actually be ready for operations for another 2-3 months after that.
* Even after its primary/secondary/whoknows missions are over, Odyssey will act as NASA's primary communications link at Mars, relaying info for/about the other Mars missions over the next few years.
I was glad to see that some of my favorite designers were represented, particularly Richard Garriot (well, in the older days anyway) and Warren Spector. Both were involved in the development of
Ultima Underworld, still my favorite computer game of all time. Vastly underrated for the influence it had.
I thought it was interesting that a huge company like Namco would be mixed in as one of the "influential developers", given it's actually a diverse behemoth instead of a "godfather" per se. Anyway, on their list of influential titles, they left off one of Namco's very best: an innovative little 3D tank game called Assault. Assault is just about the best adrenaline-pumping pure action arcade game I've ever played. Incredibly difficult, and by the time you get to the final level, if you aren't literally breaking a sweat from moving the controllers, you're just dead. If you ever get the chance to play an original, take it.
Ignoring the hoaxiness (oh, the hoaxiness!), it's easy to generate many fractals. My science project my junior year in high school was a program on an Apple ][ to generate simple fractals algorithmically from a couple of basic rules. Here's the easiest one to picture:
* On the X,Y plane, pick three points which are the corners of an equilateral triangle.
* Now pick any fourth point, and plot it.
* Now randomly choose one corner of the triangle, and move the plot point halfway towards it. Plot that point, then pick another corner, move halfway, and plot again. Repeat.
If you let this run for a while, the points converge into a shape called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a readily-recognizable series of nested triangles. By varying the location and number of the control points, the transformation rules used to alter your plot point (use different movement rules, for instance, or weigh the probabilities of choosing those rules in some way) you can produce a wide variety of interesting and beautiful fractals.
One of my favorites is, how many people would have to be in a room before the odds of at least two of them having the same birthday would be greater than 50-50? The answer (if I'm doing my math right here) is only 23 - smaller than you'd think. Not a hard problem, but one that catches a lot of people.
> This is a pretty strong article talking about Apple's delivery of *nix to the common man,
Er... given the slogan of Slashdot to present "News for Nerds", I'd think they would at least provide *some* sort of basis for differentiating their "news" stories from their "opinion" stories. This wasn't an "article", it was an editorial opinion, with no factual statements per se, and frankly no new information either. Why is this story on the front page? From the fact that the word "opinion" is in the URL itself, you'd think somebody would recognize and acknowledge this...
Wait, this just in: Powersauce is full of apple-y goodness! Nobody else concentrates the power of apples in bar form! Back to you Dave...
If you consider "the 'Net" to be an example of "Open Source" - well, consider.
: Cancer
True - though the greater scientific collaboration available due to the utility of the Internet has certainly allowed research to proceed faster.
: World Hunger
I'd be interested to know if efforts like the Motley Fool's annual charity drive on behalf of organizations like Share our Strength is having an impact.
: Suicide
I've known a lot of depressed individuals who have found support from online communities that could never have existed without the Internet. MUDs and MOOs and MUCKs, web-based discussion forums, you name it. A friend of mine recently started a website that focuses on sexual freedom and expression for the physically disabled. By virtue of its place online, that effort is able to reach a far greater audience than the individual would ever have had the chance to reach on her own.
: War
I'm not sure there's an example of the Internet stopping a war yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in the near future.
: Britney Spears
That truly *would* be a service to mankind. I suppose if we look at communities like Napster as providing greater access to alternative or otherwise unknown artists, then maybe it has the ability to broaden people's palettes to where pap like Britney Spears will no longer satisfy the masses. We can hope, anyway.
>There's just time for him to take a quick trip to Mir.
Actually, this is the same guy who was trying to get onto Mir last year. He was instead told he'd get to go on ISS earlier this year.
The Russians think the Americans are just grandstanding here, trying to show who really runs ISS. Darned if they aren't right, too. Maybe next time they won't be two years late with their components for the bloomin' thing...
For those who are fans of the Ultima series, my web site, The Notable Ultima, contains quite a bit of historical information on the series. It's sadly out of date - I've never bothered updating it for U9 or most of the UO stuff, for obvious reasons - but if you'd like a trip down memory lane, you may enjoy it.
</blatantplug>
If you're looking for a standard "vocabulary" to use in the context of RDF, W3's RDF FAQ has a link to suggestions about how to implement the Dublin Core tags via RDF. For a more specific and extensive vocabulary, you're probably right - there's very little agreement about what sort of standard to use. It's kind of ironic actually; libraries have been using one of two different organizational systems (Dewey or LOC) for roughly a century, either of which seems like it would lend itself handily to indexing the web topically. Yet in the quickest-growing body of knowledge on the planet, nobody wants either of those, and nobody seems to be able to agree on anything new either.
>don't adults have the right to access obscence materal? [sic]
Actually, no. US law differentiates "questionable" materials into at least two different categories, which are called "indecent" and "obscene". Materials which are "obscene" are outside of the normal public purview - things like child pornography, for example, which is illegal everywhere. The standards for "indecent" material, on the other hand, are decided by local and regional governments, based on their own laws. In other words, different communities have the right to decide for themselves whether "indecent" materials are allowed in various contexts; however, "obscene" materials aren't allowed in any context. Inasmuch as CIPA applies to "obscene" materials, it isn't that bad; after all, the material is for the most part illegal for adults as well. At least, it wouldn't be that bad if it were actually possible to write filtering technology that didn't block access to perfectly legitimate things as well - which it isn't. However, CIPA also says that access to "inappropriate material" has to be blocked. It also says that what is "inappropriate material" is supposed to be decided at the local level. In other words, this is code language for "indecent" material - which can basically be just about anything some local school official decides he doesn't want you to see.
Hmm... I guess the title of that should have said "Parenting not the cause of violence", not "Parents...", since if it is genetically related, then it kind of *is* the parents. But anyway...:-)
Well, here's a different perspective. In Matt Ridley's book Genome, he goes into some of the latest research on genetics and the relationship between parenting and child behavior. Apparently there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that parental skill or involvement is *not* the greatest indicator of child behavior. However, neither is exposure to media. Instead, a lot of the tendency towards violence seems to be genetically based.
For example, there have been studies with adopted children, correlating their behavior to their birth parents and their adopted parents. Natural children of violent parents have a tendency to be violent - this has been long known. (Children of abusers tend statistically to become abusers themselves, for instance.) This has been assumed to be related to their violent environment. However, children adopted into violent homes do *not* show the same statistical predilection towards violence. And further, children of violent adults who are adopted by non-violent adults, even if they are adopted at an extremely early age, tend to *be* more violent, regardless of the environment they are raised in.
This is not to say that parenting and environment doesn't play a big role, of course; but it does give pause for thought. We're so quick to "blame the parents", just like we "blame the media", or "blame the video games", or whatever. Maybe we're just seeing relationships where there is really only simple correlation, not true causation. Maybe we don't understand ourselves as well as we think we do.
I don't know if the EarthLink browser can be set to run through a local proxy, but if it can, then Proximitron can prevent the extra HTTP header from being sent at all. I just started using it, and it works wonderfully. Plus the paranoid among us can open the HTTP log window and watch what's being sent out and received, for that warm-and-fuzzy reassuring feeling.
It's far from the first time - there's a long tradition of game companies altering box and screenshot art. The first instance I'm aware of where a company rigged their own artwork was Wing Commander. What made it significant was that it was one of the first games that looked significantly "real", and in fact in the advertising, they made a big point that the box art was an actual screenshot from the game. It wasn't until playing it for a while that I realized that the cockpit shown didn't look like any from the game; and worse, the weapon effects on the cover had been digitally added, and didn't actually match anything in the game. In other words, the first time a game company *ever* (to my knowledge - anyone know of one earlier?) claimed to show actual screen art on the game box, well, they lied. That was 1990 - not too much has changed since.
I have to say, I mourn the death of quality arcade game manufacturers. Fortunately, Capcom was not one of them. Sigh... my first job was running the game room in a ShowBiz Pizza (think Chuck E. Cheese with a bear instead of a mouse) the summer after I graduated from high school. By the end of that summer, I could rack up high scores on Spyhunter and Robotron 2084 without fail. I still remember some of the advanced levels of Bump N' Jump like the back of my hand. If only we'd had a Star Wars machine, I might never have left.
I spent half my youth either in or begging to go into arcades. I remember the first time I saw PacMan, the week it was released in the US. I remember the first time I saw a Missile Command. There used to be a Lunar Lander in the Aladdin's Castle in the mall near where I lived. I got in trouble I don't know how many times for sneaking a mile and a half up the street past the junior college to blow my quarters on the Centipede at the Shop-a-Snak mini mart, or the Galaxian at the Majik Market across the street. And when I was in college, I was lucky enough that the one "leftover" arcade game the vendors installed in our cafeteria was Bubble Bobble. Now THAT was a game - maybe the best game ever released.
I'm not going to lose sleep over Capcom not making money off of Super Ultra Street Fighter 2 Turbo Alpha Zany X-Men Spice Girls Crossover Mega. Gimme a break. I haven't seen an original arcade game in years. Though Dance Dance Revolution comes close, even if it is just memorization. At least it's different.:-) Sigh... I want my Robotron back.
Why is it that every problem requires an incredibly complicated technical solution to overcome? It seems to me that problems that arise through legal silliness can often be solved the same way.
For the French courts to arbitrarily start talking about "localization software" is just a symptom of the over-teching people always seem to fall victim to these days. If they want to bar French citizens from being able to view these materials, and the problem is that they don't know which users are French, then the answer is incredibly simple: add a verification screen to the account creation process, requiring that users of French origin identify themselves, and agree (terms of use) not to attempt to view anything having to do with Nazi origin. Microsoft and Netscape had to do the same thing for years with regard to their browsers and 128-bit encryption, due to the lame US laws regarding encryption export. They simply "asked" downloaders to verify and agree not to do that which they shouldn't do. From a legal perspective, that's all that was required. Surely if French users are required to agree to a similar statement when they first create their accounts, then it is the user, not Yahoo!, who becomes legally responsible at that moment. If the user then deliberately violates Yahoo!'s Terms of Use agreement, Yahoo! can simply claim that they were the ones who were violated. And if catching new users isn't sufficient, cause a one-time agreement screen to pop up whenever any existing user accounts are next accessed as well.
Given the DCMA, I'd say that French users accessing Nazi materials after clicking through such an "access control" page would be violating *US* law - so at that point the French courts could bite Yahoo!'s collective bums. Figuratively speaking.
Firstly conventional drilling technology employs fixed drill bits, which use water and suction to remove rock debris. This system has no such facility for that.
Everyone knows that beam weapons cause matter to disintegrate and then just disappear. Don't you watch Star Trek?
It's interesting that people are using KSR's works to justify reaching and terraforming Mars. One of the primary themes of his books, particularly Green and Blue, is that Mars doesn't present a sufficient amount of living space to significantly alter the population levels on the Earth. I think he estimated something like 100-200 million population, tops, even after it was completely terraformed. In the books, Earth continues to suffer from massive and devastating overpopulation problems while and after Mars gets terraformed. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for going to (and terraforming!) Mars - but I hope that people will keep a perspective on the venture while we're doing it. Neither Mars, nor Eurpopa or Titan or any other conceivably livable body in the Solar System, are likely to have a significant impact on Earth's population or resource problems. Now... mining the asteroid and Kupier belts... that's another story.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
>I don't think dictionary attacks are subject to emotional impact.
Sigh... so use captials, or one extra punctuation or spelling substitution, or any of the other suggestions in this thread. The *point* being that using an absurd phrase allows you (or Joe Q. User) to remember more words, which makes dictionary attacks (or brute attacks for that matter) exponentially harder, at the same time as making it far less likely that someone would guess your phrase, Hollywood-style. But then, you already knew that, didn't you?
Even using two words would be better and n^2 harder to break than most people ever bother with.
The recently-published 3rd edition of the UNIX System Administration Handbook has a good guide for passphrase selection - which (to stay on-topic) they in turn borrowed from an old version of the PGP Passphrase FAQ. The concept is called "shocking nonsense" - something containing gross, obscene, or otherwise extreme and improbable juxtapositions of ideas. The example they give is: "Mollusks peck my galloping genitals." (No, really - I'm not making this up!) The idea is that the emotional impact of the phrase itself makes it unlikely that an outside individual would ever guess it.
> It's a bug in the Turbo Pascal runtimes.
:= x + 1;
I certainly believe that. I ran into some truly bizarre problems with Turbo Pascal. At one point, I was writing a simple game, and the program kept hard-crashing the computer. Eventually after several reboots, I managed to use the debugger to isolate the statement in the game loop which was crashing. The offending statement was this:
x
After a seemingly random number of iterations, somewhere between 100-150, the debugger showed this statement as being executed when the PC would crash. Never did get around it. Guess it just goes to show that when it comes to totally bug-free code, you can't trust anything.
> Granted it's supposedly a red dwarf which wouldn't
> give off too much light, but at 1-3 lys away, it should
> show up fairly brightly, I would guess.
There's also the possibility that it is a brown dwarf, barely visible at all. A previously unknown brown dwarf was recently discovered only 13 ly from Earth, purely by chance as I recall.
Hmm... admittedly, for a lot of dot-coms that's actually literally true - or at least they probably *paid* more for the domain than they ever earned back. So hey, sure, why not codify that into case law as well? And what a business plan: "Sure, I'll license you to use the name ThisDomain.com next year - in exchange for 105% of the revenues you earn from it. Sound fair?" What a screwed up system.
What's really great about this sort of straw man argument is that you can substitute *practically anything* as the target. Especially techie things. There probably isn't a topic on Slashdot you couldn't troll this way. Isn't that great?
Here's my favorite equivalent:
s/We're/Columbus is/
s/Mars/the New World/
s/billion/million/
s/planets/continents/
s/on Earth/in Europe/
Sigh... as if anyone alive today could still doubt the value of pure scientific research with a straight face. And yet, there it is.
Here's the real NASA site for the Odyssey mission:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/
Of interest:
* Although the spacecraft arrives at Mars in October, it will use the same aerobraking maneuver used by the earlier Mars Global Surveyor, so it won't actually be ready for operations for another 2-3 months after that.
* Even after its primary/secondary/whoknows missions are over, Odyssey will act as NASA's primary communications link at Mars, relaying info for/about the other Mars missions over the next few years.
I thought it was interesting that a huge company like Namco would be mixed in as one of the "influential developers", given it's actually a diverse behemoth instead of a "godfather" per se. Anyway, on their list of influential titles, they left off one of Namco's very best: an innovative little 3D tank game called Assault. Assault is just about the best adrenaline-pumping pure action arcade game I've ever played. Incredibly difficult, and by the time you get to the final level, if you aren't literally breaking a sweat from moving the controllers, you're just dead. If you ever get the chance to play an original, take it.
Ignoring the hoaxiness (oh, the hoaxiness!), it's easy to generate many fractals. My science project my junior year in high school was a program on an Apple ][ to generate simple fractals algorithmically from a couple of basic rules. Here's the easiest one to picture:
* On the X,Y plane, pick three points which are the corners of an equilateral triangle.
* Now pick any fourth point, and plot it.
* Now randomly choose one corner of the triangle, and move the plot point halfway towards it. Plot that point, then pick another corner, move halfway, and plot again. Repeat.
If you let this run for a while, the points converge into a shape called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a readily-recognizable series of nested triangles. By varying the location and number of the control points, the transformation rules used to alter your plot point (use different movement rules, for instance, or weigh the probabilities of choosing those rules in some way) you can produce a wide variety of interesting and beautiful fractals.
One of my favorites is, how many people would have to be in a room before the odds of at least two of them having the same birthday would be greater than 50-50? The answer (if I'm doing my math right here) is only 23 - smaller than you'd think. Not a hard problem, but one that catches a lot of people.
Er... given the slogan of Slashdot to present "News for Nerds", I'd think they would at least provide *some* sort of basis for differentiating their "news" stories from their "opinion" stories. This wasn't an "article", it was an editorial opinion, with no factual statements per se, and frankly no new information either. Why is this story on the front page? From the fact that the word "opinion" is in the URL itself, you'd think somebody would recognize and acknowledge this...
Wait, this just in: Powersauce is full of apple-y goodness! Nobody else concentrates the power of apples in bar form! Back to you Dave...
: Cancer
True - though the greater scientific collaboration available due to the utility of the Internet has certainly allowed research to proceed faster.
: World Hunger
I'd be interested to know if efforts like the Motley Fool's annual charity drive on behalf of organizations like Share our Strength is having an impact.
: Suicide
I've known a lot of depressed individuals who have found support from online communities that could never have existed without the Internet. MUDs and MOOs and MUCKs, web-based discussion forums, you name it. A friend of mine recently started a website that focuses on sexual freedom and expression for the physically disabled. By virtue of its place online, that effort is able to reach a far greater audience than the individual would ever have had the chance to reach on her own.
: War
I'm not sure there's an example of the Internet stopping a war yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in the near future.
: Britney Spears
That truly *would* be a service to mankind. I suppose if we look at communities like Napster as providing greater access to alternative or otherwise unknown artists, then maybe it has the ability to broaden people's palettes to where pap like Britney Spears will no longer satisfy the masses. We can hope, anyway.
Actually, this is the same guy who was trying to get onto Mir last year. He was instead told he'd get to go on ISS earlier this year.
The Russians think the Americans are just grandstanding here, trying to show who really runs ISS. Darned if they aren't right, too. Maybe next time they won't be two years late with their components for the bloomin' thing...
For those who are fans of the Ultima series, my web site, The Notable Ultima, contains quite a bit of historical information on the series. It's sadly out of date - I've never bothered updating it for U9 or most of the UO stuff, for obvious reasons - but if you'd like a trip down memory lane, you may enjoy it.
</blatantplug>
http://www.google.com/search?fibre+optic+gyroscop
comes this:
ESA, 1998: New European Gyroscopes for Space
If you're looking for a standard "vocabulary" to use in the context of RDF, W3's RDF FAQ has a link to suggestions about how to implement the Dublin Core tags via RDF. For a more specific and extensive vocabulary, you're probably right - there's very little agreement about what sort of standard to use. It's kind of ironic actually; libraries have been using one of two different organizational systems (Dewey or LOC) for roughly a century, either of which seems like it would lend itself handily to indexing the web topically. Yet in the quickest-growing body of knowledge on the planet, nobody wants either of those, and nobody seems to be able to agree on anything new either.
Actually, no. US law differentiates "questionable" materials into at least two different categories, which are called "indecent" and "obscene". Materials which are "obscene" are outside of the normal public purview - things like child pornography, for example, which is illegal everywhere. The standards for "indecent" material, on the other hand, are decided by local and regional governments, based on their own laws. In other words, different communities have the right to decide for themselves whether "indecent" materials are allowed in various contexts; however, "obscene" materials aren't allowed in any context. Inasmuch as CIPA applies to "obscene" materials, it isn't that bad; after all, the material is for the most part illegal for adults as well. At least, it wouldn't be that bad if it were actually possible to write filtering technology that didn't block access to perfectly legitimate things as well - which it isn't. However, CIPA also says that access to "inappropriate material" has to be blocked. It also says that what is "inappropriate material" is supposed to be decided at the local level. In other words, this is code language for "indecent" material - which can basically be just about anything some local school official decides he doesn't want you to see.
Hmm... I guess the title of that should have said "Parenting not the cause of violence", not "Parents...", since if it is genetically related, then it kind of *is* the parents. But anyway... :-)
For example, there have been studies with adopted children, correlating their behavior to their birth parents and their adopted parents. Natural children of violent parents have a tendency to be violent - this has been long known. (Children of abusers tend statistically to become abusers themselves, for instance.) This has been assumed to be related to their violent environment. However, children adopted into violent homes do *not* show the same statistical predilection towards violence. And further, children of violent adults who are adopted by non-violent adults, even if they are adopted at an extremely early age, tend to *be* more violent, regardless of the environment they are raised in.
This is not to say that parenting and environment doesn't play a big role, of course; but it does give pause for thought. We're so quick to "blame the parents", just like we "blame the media", or "blame the video games", or whatever. Maybe we're just seeing relationships where there is really only simple correlation, not true causation. Maybe we don't understand ourselves as well as we think we do.
I don't know if the EarthLink browser can be set to run through a local proxy, but if it can, then Proximitron can prevent the extra HTTP header from being sent at all. I just started using it, and it works wonderfully. Plus the paranoid among us can open the HTTP log window and watch what's being sent out and received, for that warm-and-fuzzy reassuring feeling.
It's far from the first time - there's a long tradition of game companies altering box and screenshot art. The first instance I'm aware of where a company rigged their own artwork was Wing Commander. What made it significant was that it was one of the first games that looked significantly "real", and in fact in the advertising, they made a big point that the box art was an actual screenshot from the game. It wasn't until playing it for a while that I realized that the cockpit shown didn't look like any from the game; and worse, the weapon effects on the cover had been digitally added, and didn't actually match anything in the game. In other words, the first time a game company *ever* (to my knowledge - anyone know of one earlier?) claimed to show actual screen art on the game box, well, they lied. That was 1990 - not too much has changed since.
I have to say, I mourn the death of quality arcade game manufacturers. Fortunately, Capcom was not one of them. Sigh... my first job was running the game room in a ShowBiz Pizza (think Chuck E. Cheese with a bear instead of a mouse) the summer after I graduated from high school. By the end of that summer, I could rack up high scores on Spyhunter and Robotron 2084 without fail. I still remember some of the advanced levels of Bump N' Jump like the back of my hand. If only we'd had a Star Wars machine, I might never have left.
:-) Sigh... I want my Robotron back.
I spent half my youth either in or begging to go into arcades. I remember the first time I saw PacMan, the week it was released in the US. I remember the first time I saw a Missile Command. There used to be a Lunar Lander in the Aladdin's Castle in the mall near where I lived. I got in trouble I don't know how many times for sneaking a mile and a half up the street past the junior college to blow my quarters on the Centipede at the Shop-a-Snak mini mart, or the Galaxian at the Majik Market across the street. And when I was in college, I was lucky enough that the one "leftover" arcade game the vendors installed in our cafeteria was Bubble Bobble. Now THAT was a game - maybe the best game ever released.
I'm not going to lose sleep over Capcom not making money off of Super Ultra Street Fighter 2 Turbo Alpha Zany X-Men Spice Girls Crossover Mega. Gimme a break. I haven't seen an original arcade game in years. Though Dance Dance Revolution comes close, even if it is just memorization. At least it's different.
Why is it that every problem requires an incredibly complicated technical solution to overcome? It seems to me that problems that arise through legal silliness can often be solved the same way.
For the French courts to arbitrarily start talking about "localization software" is just a symptom of the over-teching people always seem to fall victim to these days. If they want to bar French citizens from being able to view these materials, and the problem is that they don't know which users are French, then the answer is incredibly simple: add a verification screen to the account creation process, requiring that users of French origin identify themselves, and agree (terms of use) not to attempt to view anything having to do with Nazi origin. Microsoft and Netscape had to do the same thing for years with regard to their browsers and 128-bit encryption, due to the lame US laws regarding encryption export. They simply "asked" downloaders to verify and agree not to do that which they shouldn't do. From a legal perspective, that's all that was required. Surely if French users are required to agree to a similar statement when they first create their accounts, then it is the user, not Yahoo!, who becomes legally responsible at that moment. If the user then deliberately violates Yahoo!'s Terms of Use agreement, Yahoo! can simply claim that they were the ones who were violated. And if catching new users isn't sufficient, cause a one-time agreement screen to pop up whenever any existing user accounts are next accessed as well.
Given the DCMA, I'd say that French users accessing Nazi materials after clicking through such an "access control" page would be violating *US* law - so at that point the French courts could bite Yahoo!'s collective bums. Figuratively speaking.
Everyone knows that beam weapons cause matter to disintegrate and then just disappear. Don't you watch Star Trek?
It's interesting that people are using KSR's works to justify reaching and terraforming Mars. One of the primary themes of his books, particularly Green and Blue, is that Mars doesn't present a sufficient amount of living space to significantly alter the population levels on the Earth. I think he estimated something like 100-200 million population, tops, even after it was completely terraformed. In the books, Earth continues to suffer from massive and devastating overpopulation problems while and after Mars gets terraformed. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for going to (and terraforming!) Mars - but I hope that people will keep a perspective on the venture while we're doing it. Neither Mars, nor Eurpopa or Titan or any other conceivably livable body in the Solar System, are likely to have a significant impact on Earth's population or resource problems. Now... mining the asteroid and Kupier belts... that's another story. :-)