Well, here's my personal opinion as to why government-funded code should be GPL and NOT BSD. If the code is released BSD, then anyone may do with it what they wish--including make proprietary changes and not release them, in essence making use of tax dollars directly for their own benefit. If the code is released GPL, then the benefit stays with the public rather than being available for appropriation by a (in theory) corporate entity.
Now this is a bit simplistic of course, and I'm certainly open to debate:) You might say, for example, "Well there are already lots of forms of corporate welfare, where tax dollars go to directly helping corporations." Well, this is true, but I don't usually think that such expenditures are a good idea, and I certainly don't think that just because it already happens, that it would be a good idea to encourage MORE of it. I am of the opinion (for now, at least) that it is the government's duty to make sure that publicly funded things are available for public use and do not get appropriated for private gain.
Now on that last point, granted, code can be copied, so (like all other information) it's not like Microsoft using BSD'd gov-funded code means the code is unavailable for use by anyone else... but it DOES mean that Microsoft can now benefit from that *at the expense of the public*. I'm not comfortable with that, particularly.
Of course, this is all debatable -- as a matter of law, I don't know whether BSD or GPL (or some other scheme entirely) is the legitimate answer... but generally I would tend to think that the GPL is the more "ethical" answer.
Re:You've just never heard a really good sound sys
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Insanely Audiophile
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· Score: 2
Well, I've been to a couple of really small gigs (Naked to the World at the Genghis Cohen Cantina in Los Angeles, to name one) and they sounded fine, not really any different than other rock concerts (if a lot quieter and smaller than, say, Metallica). Spending even $500 to recreate that kind of sound is simply not important to me; I really only listen to music to make driving and programming more bearable. (Granted I LIKE doing both, but I *have* to drive to work and then I *have* to program when I'm there; oddly enough I don't listen to music when I code at home.)
As for symphony orchestra stuff... there, I'll agree. I've been to several symphonies a number of times, and it's a full, deep sound; I really enjoy it when I do go. The problem is that spending thousands of dollars to recreate that in my home is, to me, a waste, when I could use that money to simply GO to the symphony!:) I mean, that guy who spent $140,000 on sound equipment... extreme, yes, but he could have gotten $500 front-row seats to 280 concerts for that money!
You've just never heard a really good sound system
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Insanely Audiophile
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· Score: 2
...is what I keep reading from people. Person A says, "Come on, it can't sound so much better that it's worth THAT much more money." Person B responds with, "You've just never heard a really good high-end sound system! Go down to your local hi-fi shop and you'll see what we're talking about!"
I have a problem with this. Near the beginning of the article, he said that the apparent goal of hardcore audiophiles was to be able to recreate the exact sound and feel of live music.
I don't really like live music. I've been to a lot of concerts (Metallica, Offspring, Green Day, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Joe Satriani, plus festivals like the KROQ Weenie Roast and Almost Acoustic Christmas, to name a few) and even though these are a few of my favorite artists, and I usually do enjoy the show, I've found that I never liked the way live music sounds nearly as much as the studio albums. I don't really know why this is; certainly live music is a HELL OF A LOT LOUDER THAN RECORDED MUSIC, but I never enjoy it as much.
If the goal is to sound like it's live, then, well, you won't catch me spending more than $25 on a pair of headphones -- I wear them at work so that I can tune out the marketing yahoos who hover around the programmers' desks all day, not so that I can enjoy the sublime essence of Clapton's farts -- because I don't really like live music very much. If live music isn't the goal, then what is?
Also, I was annoyed by the guy in the article who said, "Would you take a book to the symphony?" No, asshole, I wouldn't -- if I was ACTUALLY AT A SYMPHONY, not sitting in my oak-paneled den grooving on how awesome I am. I was amazed that the writer didn't interview any of these guys' wives or girlfriends to see what they think of their man's habits. Then again, maybe these guys don't have an SO... for whatever reason.:)
I'm interested in getting a hybrid or electric car for my next vehicle, and I was hoping anyone could refer me to some web pages that have good, up-to-date info on technologies, products (i.e. what vehicles are available from what manufacturers?), environmental issues, etc.
For all relevant data, note that I'm in the U.S. and plan on staying here, so directing me to the site of a company that only manufactures cars in Germany isn't going to help. Thanks in advance!
I thought the whole point of a patent was that you could patent a PARTICULAR METHOD of doing something, say, making 360 degree images. Patents don't cover an entire idea! If you patent a method of creating 360 degree images, and I use a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT method to make a 360 degree image, I haven't violated your patent. Now, if they had a patent on exactly what Prof. Dersch was doing, then, well, yeah, I guess he violated the patent. If not, then what the fuck do they think they're doing?
To my knowledge, the U.S. Government cannot legally itself copyright info (i.e. if a government office, like the DoE, releases its annual report on energy consumption, that report enters the public domain and has no copyright license at all), but it CAN award contracts to private companies that can produce copyrighted work. It depends on the contract: if the contract says that All Your Work Are Belong To U.S., then the government owns the work and cannot copyright it; if the contract says the work belongs to the company, then the company can copyright it as usual.
This is to the best of my knowledge; I could be wrong.
Here's a list of some skeptical sites that I visit regularly or on occasion. They're, in my opinion, very useful in refining one's own baloney detection sense. (Re, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection" by Carl Sagan.)
The Skeptic's Dictionary. An A to Z of mythical, supernatural, and other bizarre topics, but looking at them from the point of view of, "Is this shit for real?" (Hint: the site basically debunks every mystical supernatural piece of BS you ever heard of.)
The Committee for the Scientific Inquiry into Claims of the Paranormal. A great general site with articles, references, links, etc. CSICOP basically keeps a watch out for people making paranormal or supernatural claims, and then investigating them scientifically to see if they stand up. (Strangely, they never do... maybe this tells us something about paranormality in general?)
We all know Gandhi's old line: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Now it seems that MS has gotten to the point where they are just playing hard dirty: calling Linux a "cancer" based on incorrect assumptions about the workings of the GPL (although we all know full well that MS, and Ballmer, know that neither Linux nor the GPL do any such thing as Ballmer describes -- it is pure FUD, they know it, we know they know, they know we know they know, etc.).
MS &c. MUST know that anyone like "us" (open source advocates) will know that Ballmer is full of crap. So presumably this article is intended for people who don't know any better: perhaps MS's 500 corporate customers in the tri-state area, some of whom might have been thinking about alternatives to MS... "Hey, Bob, did you hear? Linux gives you cancer!"
But my point is that I don't think MS would be resorting to obviously desperate tactics like this if they weren't in stage 3: fighting. The problem is that there are only two ways that Microsoft can "defeat" Linux in any real sense:
1) Destroy all copies of Linux
2) Make Linux (or the GPL) illegal
#1 is obviously unfeasible. Therefore I can only conclude that MS will, eventually, attempt #2: try to buy laws that make Open/Free Software illegal in some way.
Determining implications of the Orwellian future implied above is left as an exercise to the reader.
An antimatter explosion would probably look more or less identical to a nuclear explosion. In fact, any sizable explosion in atmosphere will produce a mushroom cloud; the particle mechanics involved with nuclear and antimatter explosions differ, but the large-scale effect is the emission of lots of EM radiation (light and heat and all across the spectrum), as well as a great deal of kinetic energy (the shockwave). A 20 megaton hydrogen bomb explosion and a 20 megaton antimatter bomb explosion would probably be mostly indistinguishable.
One other thing to consider is that if you just drop a 1 kg ball of antimatter onto the ground, the entire mass of antimatter isn't going to all annihilate simultaneously, since the outer layer is going to come into contact with matter before the inner part of the antimatter ball is. For the maximum yield, the idea would be to have every particle of antimatter contact an equal-mass particle of matter simultaneously, but that's clearly not a trivial task (if it's even feasible).
Eventually all of the antimatter in such a "ball" would annihilate with regular matter, but certainly not all at once -- the initial contact with, say, the atmosphere would cause maybe the outer 5% of the antimatter ball to annihilate "simultaneously", however, this would cause a gigantic enough explosion, and the rest of the antimatter would be dispersed into a cloud that, shortly thereafter, would start reacting with atmosphere. It would be an explosion that would take 10-15 seconds to actually occur!:) Sort of like a gigantic sparkler...
My numbers are probably off but I think my theory is correct. I *think*.:)
Let me give you another example. Using Windows, printer drivers are stored in DLLs. They are accessed by software at run-time to set printer settings, to rasterize output, and to peform various other kinds of error checking.
If the GPL is held to apply to software that links at runtime to DLLs, it would mean that every Windows printer driver in the world would be required to conform to the GPL in order for GPL'd software to use them.
You have it backward. GPL software that links to a library doesn't require the library to be GPLed; software that links to a GPL library must be GPLed. At least, that's the contentious issue here.
Let me put it another way. If your printer drivers were written under the GPL, then any software which uses them must also become GPLed (or else violate the terms of the GPL -- if the writer of the software didn't want to GPL his source, he shouldn't have used those drivers). But the example you give is if a GPL program links to drivers. You have it backward.
And as a personal plea, let me request that you not post in monospace fonts; they're hard to read and frustrating. Of course, this is just my opinion; feel free to do as you will.
It's oft-repeated in stories like this one (especially lately, relating to the Asus drivers) that, "It doesn't matter what you do, people are still going to cheat."
This is true. A certain non-zero number N of people will cheat. Everyone accepts this as true.
What is NOT true is the idea that because SOME people will cheat, we shouldn't try to make it HARD for people to cheat. Sometimes, there's a tradeoff involved: sure, you can make it hard to cheat, but then the game becomes frustrating to play for people who aren't cheating. You have to find the balance point where cheaters are (mostly) prevented from doing so, and regular players are't restricted unnecessarily.
In multiplayer games like this, most of the anti-cheating measures that can be taken will *not* affect honest players. Things like encrypting the data stream (and changing the encryption method regularly), limiting what kind of input can come from the player, obscuring technical details, etc., *WILL* help reduce cheating.
"But, dirtside," you say to me, aghast that I've just promoted the idea of Security Through Obscurity (STO), "any technical measure you propose can be gotten around!" This is true. They *CAN* be gotten around... but by making them difficult to get around, we reduce the amount of cheating that *ACTUALLY* occurs. And this can end up saving the day: if only 1% of all Tribes 2 players cheat, then in the average Tribes game you're unlikely to encounter even 1 person who is cheating. Honest players will therefore see cheating as something that is not a problem in Tribes, and the game will flourish because people aren't frustrated by trying to compete with cheaters.
On the other hand, if 20% of Tribes 2 players cheat, then that means in a 10-on-10 CTF pickup game you join, there are, on average, 4 people cheating. In fact, with 20%, you'd be hard-pressed to find any moderately-populated game that didn't have so much cheating that the fun is essentially ruined. Now honest players will quickly get the impression that the Tribes 2 online community is rife with cheaters, and as such it's no fun playing Tribes 2 online, and the community suffers.
"But people WILL cheat!" Yes, but having gaming and hardware companies making it *trivially easy* to cheat will be the kind of factor that increases that cheat percentage from 1 to 20%.
Now, STO isn't a method you'd want to use when securing data that you would *never* want anyone to see -- but we're not talking about the same kind of security we talk about when we want our emails or telnet sessions encrypted. Obfuscating the inner workings of a game so as to make it more difficult for cheaters to cheat (while not inconveniencing honest players) is not the same as relying on STO for protecting the data integrity of my web server and database.
Some people have mentioned that, at least in the particular case of the Asus drivers, developers and other honest folks actually WOULD have some use for the see-through ability of the drivers. So would it be possible to retain those features without making them available for every d00d, hax0r and punk-ass cheater to use? No, I can't think of any. That doesn't mean there AREN'T any; I'd bet there are graphics programmers here who could think of something feasible.
This isn't news. The French have been jabbering away at the rest of the world since time immemorial, and I'm sure they've been jabbering away on French Telecom at least half as long.:)
(Best British newspaper headline ever: "The Further Machinations of Froggy Telecom")
I've always thought that this kind of punishment -- punishing the loser in a civil case by forcing them to pay the opposing side's legal expenses -- is yet another method of giving more power to those who already have money and power.
If I (a small individual) have a legitimate claim against a large corporation, and I go against them in court, they can easily run up millions of dollars' worth of legal expenses, without it making a significant dent in their bottom line. And since they have millions of dollars with which to more or less buy a victory (let's face it, the legal system in the US is fairly unbalanced in favor of those who can afford lots of expert witnesses, expensive delays, etc. etc.), if I end up losing, then now I (small individual) end up owing millions of dollars to a large corporation.
This is a good thing? If I honestly thought I had a legitimate claim, but lost because of an unbalance?
This kind of thinking seems like it would give corporations *even more power*. If a big company sues a little guy like me, and I end up spending 50 grand on my legal defense, and they LOSE, oh no! They're out 50,000 whole dollars! Nevermind that they spent ten times that much on their OWN legal defense.
Patrick Warburton is the NASA engineer
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Review: The Dish
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· Score: 2
Kevin Harrington plays Mitch, one of the Australians -- the "humorless" NASA engineer is played by Patrick Warburton (better known as David Puddy on "Seinfeld" and, soon, as The Tick in the live-action TV show of The Tick).
Two people could not look more different... Kevin Harrington is short and pudgy, Patrick Warburton is tall and barrel-chested.
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to find the guy who patented leather.
I call Windows XP "Windows for Dummies". Of course, that's redundant. :)
Well, here's my personal opinion as to why government-funded code should be GPL and NOT BSD. If the code is released BSD, then anyone may do with it what they wish--including make proprietary changes and not release them, in essence making use of tax dollars directly for their own benefit. If the code is released GPL, then the benefit stays with the public rather than being available for appropriation by a (in theory) corporate entity.
:) You might say, for example, "Well there are already lots of forms of corporate welfare, where tax dollars go to directly helping corporations." Well, this is true, but I don't usually think that such expenditures are a good idea, and I certainly don't think that just because it already happens, that it would be a good idea to encourage MORE of it. I am of the opinion (for now, at least) that it is the government's duty to make sure that publicly funded things are available for public use and do not get appropriated for private gain.
Now this is a bit simplistic of course, and I'm certainly open to debate
Now on that last point, granted, code can be copied, so (like all other information) it's not like Microsoft using BSD'd gov-funded code means the code is unavailable for use by anyone else... but it DOES mean that Microsoft can now benefit from that *at the expense of the public*. I'm not comfortable with that, particularly.
Of course, this is all debatable -- as a matter of law, I don't know whether BSD or GPL (or some other scheme entirely) is the legitimate answer... but generally I would tend to think that the GPL is the more "ethical" answer.
But I thought the Red October was dismantled! The caterpillar drive had some fatal flaws that would prevent it from ever being...
Oh. Silent HARD drive. That's different. Does Alec Baldwin know about this?
The theory goes: The fact that none of the situations described in the song are ironic, is itself ironic. :)
Oh, what sad times are these when passing ruffians can say 'boo' at will to old ladies.
The others might rain fire, but I think Zeus would do something wacky like turn into a turnip and have sex with your wife.
Wait... is the monkey-puncher theory your theory of how life arose, or of how gcc arose?
(40 + 10) / 2 = 30 / 2 = 15
40 + (10 / 2) = 40 + 5 = 45
In neither case is the answer 25.
- Math Nazi
Well, I've been to a couple of really small gigs (Naked to the World at the Genghis Cohen Cantina in Los Angeles, to name one) and they sounded fine, not really any different than other rock concerts (if a lot quieter and smaller than, say, Metallica). Spending even $500 to recreate that kind of sound is simply not important to me; I really only listen to music to make driving and programming more bearable. (Granted I LIKE doing both, but I *have* to drive to work and then I *have* to program when I'm there; oddly enough I don't listen to music when I code at home.)
:) I mean, that guy who spent $140,000 on sound equipment... extreme, yes, but he could have gotten $500 front-row seats to 280 concerts for that money!
As for symphony orchestra stuff... there, I'll agree. I've been to several symphonies a number of times, and it's a full, deep sound; I really enjoy it when I do go. The problem is that spending thousands of dollars to recreate that in my home is, to me, a waste, when I could use that money to simply GO to the symphony!
...is what I keep reading from people. Person A says, "Come on, it can't sound so much better that it's worth THAT much more money." Person B responds with, "You've just never heard a really good high-end sound system! Go down to your local hi-fi shop and you'll see what we're talking about!"
:)
I have a problem with this. Near the beginning of the article, he said that the apparent goal of hardcore audiophiles was to be able to recreate the exact sound and feel of live music.
I don't really like live music. I've been to a lot of concerts (Metallica, Offspring, Green Day, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Joe Satriani, plus festivals like the KROQ Weenie Roast and Almost Acoustic Christmas, to name a few) and even though these are a few of my favorite artists, and I usually do enjoy the show, I've found that I never liked the way live music sounds nearly as much as the studio albums. I don't really know why this is; certainly live music is a HELL OF A LOT LOUDER THAN RECORDED MUSIC, but I never enjoy it as much.
If the goal is to sound like it's live, then, well, you won't catch me spending more than $25 on a pair of headphones -- I wear them at work so that I can tune out the marketing yahoos who hover around the programmers' desks all day, not so that I can enjoy the sublime essence of Clapton's farts -- because I don't really like live music very much. If live music isn't the goal, then what is?
Also, I was annoyed by the guy in the article who said, "Would you take a book to the symphony?" No, asshole, I wouldn't -- if I was ACTUALLY AT A SYMPHONY, not sitting in my oak-paneled den grooving on how awesome I am. I was amazed that the writer didn't interview any of these guys' wives or girlfriends to see what they think of their man's habits. Then again, maybe these guys don't have an SO... for whatever reason.
I'm interested in getting a hybrid or electric car for my next vehicle, and I was hoping anyone could refer me to some web pages that have good, up-to-date info on technologies, products (i.e. what vehicles are available from what manufacturers?), environmental issues, etc.
For all relevant data, note that I'm in the U.S. and plan on staying here, so directing me to the site of a company that only manufactures cars in Germany isn't going to help. Thanks in advance!
Er, right, that's what I *meant* to write, but as I am unbelievably stupid, I wrote the exact opposite of what I meant.
It's only wrong if you WERE going to buy it, but copied it instead.
There we go. Sheesh.
It is only wrong to make an unauthorized copy of a digital work if you did not intend to purchase the work in the first place.
i.e., I wouldn't have paid for it, but if I can get it for free, sure.
(Note that I am not claiming this to be true, it is merely an idea.) Comments?
I thought the whole point of a patent was that you could patent a PARTICULAR METHOD of doing something, say, making 360 degree images. Patents don't cover an entire idea! If you patent a method of creating 360 degree images, and I use a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT method to make a 360 degree image, I haven't violated your patent. Now, if they had a patent on exactly what Prof. Dersch was doing, then, well, yeah, I guess he violated the patent. If not, then what the fuck do they think they're doing?
To my knowledge, the U.S. Government cannot legally itself copyright info (i.e. if a government office, like the DoE, releases its annual report on energy consumption, that report enters the public domain and has no copyright license at all), but it CAN award contracts to private companies that can produce copyrighted work. It depends on the contract: if the contract says that All Your Work Are Belong To U.S., then the government owns the work and cannot copyright it; if the contract says the work belongs to the company, then the company can copyright it as usual.
This is to the best of my knowledge; I could be wrong.
Here's a list of some skeptical sites that I visit regularly or on occasion. They're, in my opinion, very useful in refining one's own baloney detection sense. (Re, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection" by Carl Sagan.)
The Skeptic's Dictionary. An A to Z of mythical, supernatural, and other bizarre topics, but looking at them from the point of view of, "Is this shit for real?" (Hint: the site basically debunks every mystical supernatural piece of BS you ever heard of.)
The Committee for the Scientific Inquiry into Claims of the Paranormal. A great general site with articles, references, links, etc. CSICOP basically keeps a watch out for people making paranormal or supernatural claims, and then investigating them scientifically to see if they stand up. (Strangely, they never do... maybe this tells us something about paranormality in general?)
The James Randi Educational Foundation. Similar to CSICOP, but headed by James Randi, a long-time debunker of the supposedly mystical and magical.
Also, go and read everything Carl Sagan ever wrote; it's a pity we lost him a few years ago, for he was one of the best skeptics the world had.
We all know Gandhi's old line: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Now it seems that MS has gotten to the point where they are just playing hard dirty: calling Linux a "cancer" based on incorrect assumptions about the workings of the GPL (although we all know full well that MS, and Ballmer, know that neither Linux nor the GPL do any such thing as Ballmer describes -- it is pure FUD, they know it, we know they know, they know we know they know, etc.).
MS &c. MUST know that anyone like "us" (open source advocates) will know that Ballmer is full of crap. So presumably this article is intended for people who don't know any better: perhaps MS's 500 corporate customers in the tri-state area, some of whom might have been thinking about alternatives to MS... "Hey, Bob, did you hear? Linux gives you cancer!"
But my point is that I don't think MS would be resorting to obviously desperate tactics like this if they weren't in stage 3: fighting. The problem is that there are only two ways that Microsoft can "defeat" Linux in any real sense:
1) Destroy all copies of Linux
2) Make Linux (or the GPL) illegal
#1 is obviously unfeasible. Therefore I can only conclude that MS will, eventually, attempt #2: try to buy laws that make Open/Free Software illegal in some way.
Determining implications of the Orwellian future implied above is left as an exercise to the reader.
An antimatter explosion would probably look more or less identical to a nuclear explosion. In fact, any sizable explosion in atmosphere will produce a mushroom cloud; the particle mechanics involved with nuclear and antimatter explosions differ, but the large-scale effect is the emission of lots of EM radiation (light and heat and all across the spectrum), as well as a great deal of kinetic energy (the shockwave). A 20 megaton hydrogen bomb explosion and a 20 megaton antimatter bomb explosion would probably be mostly indistinguishable.
One other thing to consider is that if you just drop a 1 kg ball of antimatter onto the ground, the entire mass of antimatter isn't going to all annihilate simultaneously, since the outer layer is going to come into contact with matter before the inner part of the antimatter ball is. For the maximum yield, the idea would be to have every particle of antimatter contact an equal-mass particle of matter simultaneously, but that's clearly not a trivial task (if it's even feasible).
:) Sort of like a gigantic sparkler...
:)
Eventually all of the antimatter in such a "ball" would annihilate with regular matter, but certainly not all at once -- the initial contact with, say, the atmosphere would cause maybe the outer 5% of the antimatter ball to annihilate "simultaneously", however, this would cause a gigantic enough explosion, and the rest of the antimatter would be dispersed into a cloud that, shortly thereafter, would start reacting with atmosphere. It would be an explosion that would take 10-15 seconds to actually occur!
My numbers are probably off but I think my theory is correct. I *think*.
Let me give you another example. Using Windows, printer drivers are stored in DLLs. They are accessed by software at run-time to set printer settings, to rasterize output, and to peform various other kinds of error checking. If the GPL is held to apply to software that links at runtime to DLLs, it would mean that every Windows printer driver in the world would be required to conform to the GPL in order for GPL'd software to use them.
You have it backward. GPL software that links to a library doesn't require the library to be GPLed; software that links to a GPL library must be GPLed. At least, that's the contentious issue here.
Let me put it another way. If your printer drivers were written under the GPL, then any software which uses them must also become GPLed (or else violate the terms of the GPL -- if the writer of the software didn't want to GPL his source, he shouldn't have used those drivers). But the example you give is if a GPL program links to drivers. You have it backward.
And as a personal plea, let me request that you not post in monospace fonts; they're hard to read and frustrating. Of course, this is just my opinion; feel free to do as you will.
It's oft-repeated in stories like this one (especially lately, relating to the Asus drivers) that, "It doesn't matter what you do, people are still going to cheat."
This is true. A certain non-zero number N of people will cheat. Everyone accepts this as true.
What is NOT true is the idea that because SOME people will cheat, we shouldn't try to make it HARD for people to cheat. Sometimes, there's a tradeoff involved: sure, you can make it hard to cheat, but then the game becomes frustrating to play for people who aren't cheating. You have to find the balance point where cheaters are (mostly) prevented from doing so, and regular players are't restricted unnecessarily.
In multiplayer games like this, most of the anti-cheating measures that can be taken will *not* affect honest players. Things like encrypting the data stream (and changing the encryption method regularly), limiting what kind of input can come from the player, obscuring technical details, etc., *WILL* help reduce cheating.
"But, dirtside," you say to me, aghast that I've just promoted the idea of Security Through Obscurity (STO), "any technical measure you propose can be gotten around!" This is true. They *CAN* be gotten around... but by making them difficult to get around, we reduce the amount of cheating that *ACTUALLY* occurs. And this can end up saving the day: if only 1% of all Tribes 2 players cheat, then in the average Tribes game you're unlikely to encounter even 1 person who is cheating. Honest players will therefore see cheating as something that is not a problem in Tribes, and the game will flourish because people aren't frustrated by trying to compete with cheaters.
On the other hand, if 20% of Tribes 2 players cheat, then that means in a 10-on-10 CTF pickup game you join, there are, on average, 4 people cheating. In fact, with 20%, you'd be hard-pressed to find any moderately-populated game that didn't have so much cheating that the fun is essentially ruined. Now honest players will quickly get the impression that the Tribes 2 online community is rife with cheaters, and as such it's no fun playing Tribes 2 online, and the community suffers.
"But people WILL cheat!" Yes, but having gaming and hardware companies making it *trivially easy* to cheat will be the kind of factor that increases that cheat percentage from 1 to 20%.
Now, STO isn't a method you'd want to use when securing data that you would *never* want anyone to see -- but we're not talking about the same kind of security we talk about when we want our emails or telnet sessions encrypted. Obfuscating the inner workings of a game so as to make it more difficult for cheaters to cheat (while not inconveniencing honest players) is not the same as relying on STO for protecting the data integrity of my web server and database.
Some people have mentioned that, at least in the particular case of the Asus drivers, developers and other honest folks actually WOULD have some use for the see-through ability of the drivers. So would it be possible to retain those features without making them available for every d00d, hax0r and punk-ass cheater to use? No, I can't think of any. That doesn't mean there AREN'T any; I'd bet there are graphics programmers here who could think of something feasible.
This isn't news. The French have been jabbering away at the rest of the world since time immemorial, and I'm sure they've been jabbering away on French Telecom at least half as long. :)
(Best British newspaper headline ever: "The Further Machinations of Froggy Telecom")
Here's a reply.
I've always thought that this kind of punishment -- punishing the loser in a civil case by forcing them to pay the opposing side's legal expenses -- is yet another method of giving more power to those who already have money and power.
If I (a small individual) have a legitimate claim against a large corporation, and I go against them in court, they can easily run up millions of dollars' worth of legal expenses, without it making a significant dent in their bottom line. And since they have millions of dollars with which to more or less buy a victory (let's face it, the legal system in the US is fairly unbalanced in favor of those who can afford lots of expert witnesses, expensive delays, etc. etc.), if I end up losing, then now I (small individual) end up owing millions of dollars to a large corporation.
This is a good thing? If I honestly thought I had a legitimate claim, but lost because of an unbalance?
This kind of thinking seems like it would give corporations *even more power*. If a big company sues a little guy like me, and I end up spending 50 grand on my legal defense, and they LOSE, oh no! They're out 50,000 whole dollars! Nevermind that they spent ten times that much on their OWN legal defense.
Kevin Harrington plays Mitch, one of the Australians -- the "humorless" NASA engineer is played by Patrick Warburton (better known as David Puddy on "Seinfeld" and, soon, as The Tick in the live-action TV show of The Tick).
Two people could not look more different... Kevin Harrington is short and pudgy, Patrick Warburton is tall and barrel-chested.