Linux and many BSD flavors are not UNIX - UNIX is a trademark of the Open Group, and anyone that doesn't pay for certification and licensing of the trademark from the Open Group cannot call themselves UNIX. Apple has paid for certification and trademark usage, so is UNIX, Linux and many flavors of BSD have not.
Yes - because they used an "or" instead of an "and" it bans all free libraries including their own. It also bans commercial game engines, plug-ins, dual-licensed software where source is available under one license, any free object such as books with expired copyrights, etc.
The real target seems to be GPLv3, but the problem is the legalese is terrible, and the inclusion of an "or" instead of an "and" I would argue means each of these is mutually exclusive, which is much worse - it bans all free software, anything available in source form (even if dual-licensed), or, say, commercial game engines (which violate ii). Even if read as an "and" it still forbids all downloadable free libraries or plugins* where the source is available that have any license whatsoever.
The terms for exclusion: (i) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (ii) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (iii) redistributable at no charge.
* speaking of plugins, they are not considered GPL-able software despite many of them existing with GPL licenses - I suggested adding it during v3 ratification, but they did not feel there was a need (there are several clauses that make them not applicable), so if you write GPL plugins, I suggest moving to another license because the one you're using is not valid.
True, but what they did by naming it that was give a big middle finger to the people fighting against free speech and say we have the right to tell people how to do this, whether it's legal to do or not - this is the same time frame as other free speech wars were also being fought (like pornography), so it is very significant for its time.
The BBS version dates to the early 80s (for certain 1981 - I had a borrowed modem and 48k Apple ][ that summer, though I'm not 100% certain that was the huge 336 page one I printed by 1983 -- and I'm sure it got bigger). It had a lot more techie stuff than the printed copy I saw years later (for instance phone phreaking boxes, hacked modem lines like the pentagon press server, etc).
Well about 1981 I got a hold of a 336 page printable copy floating around the BBS world. In 1981 I was not much older than your son, and around 1983 (pretty sure we got our printer in 1983 - we also got a non-loaner modem that year) I almost got suspended from school for bringing a couple of pages to school. It didn't help that another kid photocopied them and started selling them in the library... then fingered me as his source, the cops got called, my parents got called, etc - incidentally, I mainly brought them because of the killer smoke bomb of potassium nitrate and sugar that I wanted to show another kid, and the one that they terrified the principal didn't even work (potassium permanganate and gasoline - in the late 1970s a neutralizing agent was added to pure potassium permanganate fish tank cleaner to slow its reaction with gasoline, and pure permanganate is harder to get now).
Scary that I even remember the ingredients... but my day with the police and the principal scared the beejesus out of me, so much so that I became much more careful with just about everything. I admit, before I was 16 or so I committed a lot of white collar crime (hacking in the bad sense, phreaking, piracy, etc) with my parents largely ignorant of it. Funny how now I'm very much against the crimes I perpetrated back then, and most of the people I associated with are too (in fact, the two I keep in contact with are an MIT trained professor and a guy with a doctorate in physics who works for Alcatel-Lucent).
I think of it this way - Nintendo is a publisher more than anything, though they do some development. A publisher makes most of their money through brick-and-mortar sales (about 15%-25% of a game's cost, I believe - traditional brick-and-mortar is 50% of the markup, but that is usually lower for games, but printing, distribution, and marketing consume a lot of the cost), and digital distribution can bypass them entirely.
wow - all that and no mention of MS-DOS and MS-Windows - true that MS-DOS was purchased and was a sloppy CP/M clone, but you have to admire the redirecting of the lawsuits to the creator and running them into the ground while profiting all the way.
As for Windows, it was a copy of MacOS, which itself was a copy of Xerox, and like many copies of copies, a lot was lost in translation, especially in early versions, and much of that wasn't fixed until well after Windows 3.11 (3.11 was the first "acceptable" version of Windows, IMO, and 95 was the first usable version - then there was that giant mis-step called Windows ME...).
yeah - it's a shame that Minnesota first spun off MECC as a private company in budget cuts, and TLC mainly bought them for assets. An ex-employee I knew in the 1990s said TLC was a horrible company to work for compared to MECC, and morale was bad from day 1 after the purchase.
In 1978 there was a computer version of it for Apple ][, and by 1980 it even had graphics.
Admittedly, not all schools had computers in 1984, and heck, I would say technology digressed as I went through school - in elementary school we had an open lab with at first an 8k Apple ][, and by the time I left they had a dozen 64k Apple ][e machines. My Jr High had an 8k Apple ][ for all 3 years and didn't get any new computers until 2 years after I left (then they opened a computer lab with a dozen IBM PCs). My high school had a locked lab of IBM PCs entirely used for a typing course, and they didn't add a computer course until about 3 years after I left (intro to computers). Fortunately, my high school electronics class teacher was much more open minded about computers and had 4 of them he purchased himself for student use in his lab.
In college it digressed more... a shared 6 1MHz processor mini-computer used by 400 students and I'd just barely missed the teletype. They did upgrade the labs extensively my second year in college (we even got a mac lab with color macs - great for pr0n).
for clarification on your post, the PowerVR SGX540 is a 4 core version, not 4 chips. PowerVR has an 8 core chip as well that can push 5x the triangles and has 4x the fill rate, but that probably consumed too much power (they may not have the power reqs of phones, but they still have reqs).
My guess is they went with PowerVR because they had the fastest GPU that wasn't only a system-on-a-chip. Snapdragon Adreno's performance numbers are pretty bad comparably (they are geared more to battery life), and nVidia Tegra is a system-on-a-chip and only dual Cortex A9 CPUs, not quad. Graphics are still pretty heavy CPU loads on modern smartphones, but as shader architectures like OpenGL 2 ES are adopted, I expect more of this work to be offloaded onto the chip.
Germany has something similar, and as I recall it is per-monitor (including computer) as well. Supposedly it is to keep the number of commercials down, but I hear it doesn't help much.
My big question is since you can do the same thing with any proxy server, does that make proxy servers illegal as well?
The FCC has a role, and despite sucking in a lot of ways and doing a lot of stupid things I disagree with, they do keep regulated monopolies and virtual monopolies from destroying competition with anti-competitive practices.
In this case, it is a virtual monopoly, Verizon (Verizon owns most of the east coast phone businesses making it a virtual but not absolute monopoly there), wanting to be able to prioritize its net traffic above others, which is, of course, in their best interest because they can then strangle competition (why watch netFlix over your high speed FiOS when you could watch verizonTube and have 99.9999996% faster streams?). Any company that can fsck its competition will - it is the nature of business.
I haven't seen Playboy in years, either, but as I recall, it doesn't even show snatch, so outside of the Americas (and particularly the US and Canada), it is nothing more than what you see at the beach and on TV already.
Hardcore pornography OTOH, is classified as art in California, but definitely illegal to film in other states (I've read about people getting arrested filming it in my state - they had a permit to make a film, but pron is not allowed), so I'd say the definition varies widely.
Yep, and also what isn't mentioned is that Douglas Gentile, the lead publisher of the paper, is the former director of research for the National Institute for Media and the Family an anti-video game group that has since dissolved. That group was given an "F" by the ESRB for "inaccuracies, incomplete and misleading statements, omission of material facts, and flawed research."
I've called out this guy's "research" as flawed multiple times - how does this prove that video games cause depression? It doesn't - you can't tell whether the depression is caused by excessive video games or if depressed people tend to play more video games. This guy's a quack and nothing is proven here.
Joking aside, video games are a pariah, and the main reason they are targeted is because of the interactive nature of them. But if you read page 22 of this you will find that books and movies are MORE influential than video games. And what is the #1 behavior? Self published violent writings, which Jared L Loughner did in spades.
ATI really never put much effort into Linux support until 2009, when they finally started putting EXT extensions into consumer graphics cards instead of only into the highly marked up FireGL cards that target CAD. I quit using their cards for lack of EXT, especially display lists (a feature of OpenGL 1.5 - 1.4 with display list EXT support was the minimum hardware requirement). I still haven't tried OpenGL on their cards due to their past history and reportedly very buggy Linux drivers (and I do cross platform work both at my day job and open source projects, so I'm intimately familiar with the obstacles of cross platform).
WebM is a container - specifically a Matroska container, hence the name - but in this case it refers to specific contents of a VP8 (Google bought the company that owned the patents and released the codec royalty free) video codec and a Vorbis audio codec rather than the variety of formats the container supports.
Or by the bizarre licensing - you can't legally encode or decode H.264 without paying a royalty in the US, but if it is internet video, they will never go after the end user for encoding or decoding it. Isn't that a lot like saying you can't grow, buy, or sell pot without committing a felony, but you can smoke any you happen to have in public without consequence?
Rote is a great way to force ideas into people's heads, whether true or not. Religion has done that for generations (and by that, I mean some religion has to be wrong, if not every religion, otherwise they would all be the same).
The GIF debacle really should be called the LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welsh) debacle. GIF used the compression algorithm LZW because limited palate color table images could be compressed quickly and with fairly decent compression. Sperry, the owner of LZW allowed the patent to be used without fees and it became widely adopted (for instance, the UNIX tools compress and uncompress use it). When Unisys bought Sperry and were desperate for income, they went after everyone using any patents owned by Sperry, but the most well known one was LZW.
Arithmetic coding was used to go after JPEG, which used a hybrid of Huffman and arithmetic coding, but the workaround was for the compressing tools to just use Huffman until the patents expired. BZip2 also uses Huffman because of patent concerns about arithmetic coding (and there are some 70 odd patent, if not more on arithmetic coding, most of which are expired).
"one click" was and still is silly, as it was already widely used in a variety of applications and very obvious. It was lame that they were allowed to revise that patent to be e-commerce specific because the prior art was very similar to e-commerce.
This patent seems silly as well, because it is basically patenting something people have done using pen and paper for years. It annoys me as much as patents on Navier Stokes equations that were just reimplementing expired software patents on graphics hardware (and if they sue for my implementations, I will definitely use these as prior art).
I played Fallout 1 and 2 when they were new, and the biggest flaw was the load times and the stupid AI (in FO1 especially), which could be 45 minutes on a 2x drive. A later patch allowed moving most of the media to hard disk and between that and getting an 8x CD drive I thought both games were fantastic. Fallout 2 was my favorite game for about 5 years, as well, and I played through it dozens of times (male, female, smart, dumb, lucky, unlucky etc). I'm not saying FO3 wasn't fun, but I found it a fun shooter and a shallow role playing experience. IMO, Bethesda games are like Porno - a shallow plot and they jump right to the action with lots of tiny climaxes (quests) and more action (fighting), whereas something like Mass Effect is more like a mainstream movie - you have a dramatic, deep plot that climaxes at the end.
I finally realized while playing Fallout 3: New Vegas why the role playing part of FO3 felt so shallow when playing the game a second time as a female character. She screwed Benny, and when the screen faded to black there were dialog options - in FO3 you instantly appeared next to the bed fully clothed as if nothing had happened, which fails to even create the illusion that anything had happened (in FO2 text pretty much always appeared after the fade to black and before it faded back in). It was then that I realized FO3 had the same problem as Oblivion - it was shallow and lacked any sort of personality or character interaction in any sort of personal way. FO3 New Vegas had a bit more of this IMO with interpersonal dialogs with NPCs, but they were still very shallow compared to, say, any Bioware title.
The only problem with the factions in fallout 3 that I had was that if I kill 5 powder gangers and nobody is around to see it, how did they know I did it? Are they dusting my shell casings? It seemed a bit like the factions in Morrowind - if I backstab someone, how did the factions figure it out? Divination? I could see that happening if I were, say, bragging about it in a bar, but I don't do that in the game. Personally, I think the best implementation of factions was in Gothic (the first one), the fighting sucked but the factions and role playing were excellent. That was another series where the lead designer bolted before the second game (actually before the first was complete, but it was mostly done).
I would disagree with the external engine thing, as well, as my favorite shooter ever was technically an external engine (Unreal Tournament 2004, and no, I didn't really like UT or UT3). Unreal Engine (3 in this case) definitely seems to buck that issue, as seen in this list (from wikipedia): America's Army 3 Batman: Arkham Asylum Borderlands Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway BlackSite: Area 51 Gears of War Gears of War 2 Unreal Tournament 3 Rainbow Six Vegas Splinter Cell: Conviction Lost Odyssey Mass Effect Mass Effect 2 The Last Remnant Medal of Honor: Airborne Blade and Soul Bulletstorm
All of these reuse the same engine, and many are very good titles. So what happened with Gamebryo? Well, back when they were licensed by Bethesda for Oblivion 8+ years ago, it was called NetImmerse and it was one of the best role playing game engines on the market. Unreal and ID tech were still pretty much shooter only (and ID tech still is), and the competition was paltry in the 3D realms (lots of 2D and isometric). Over the years, Unreal has rewritten as hardware integration has changed and NetImmerse/Gamebryo just tacked on features without a badly needed core rewrite (that is my opinion from a few years ago, but I doubt much has changed). It would have been foolish for Bethesda to choose Gamebryo today - in fact, Gamebryo's parent company laid off most of their staff months ago and recently sold the assets to a Korean company, as I recall.
As for #4, it was probably a reference to Guild Wars 2, which is supposedly eliminating the holy trinity of MMOs: Tank, DPS, and Healer. While there will still be some reliance on DPS, movement seems to be much more important than tanking from what I saw of the demo.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux and many BSD flavors are not UNIX - UNIX is a trademark of the Open Group, and anyone that doesn't pay for certification and licensing of the trademark from the Open Group cannot call themselves UNIX. Apple has paid for certification and trademark usage, so is UNIX, Linux and many flavors of BSD have not.
Yes - because they used an "or" instead of an "and" it bans all free libraries including their own. It also bans commercial game engines, plug-ins, dual-licensed software where source is available under one license, any free object such as books with expired copyrights, etc.
The real target seems to be GPLv3, but the problem is the legalese is terrible, and the inclusion of an "or" instead of an "and" I would argue means each of these is mutually exclusive, which is much worse - it bans all free software, anything available in source form (even if dual-licensed), or, say, commercial game engines (which violate ii). Even if read as an "and" it still forbids all downloadable free libraries or plugins* where the source is available that have any license whatsoever.
The terms for exclusion:
(i) disclosed or distributed in source code form;
(ii) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or
(iii) redistributable at no charge.
* speaking of plugins, they are not considered GPL-able software despite many of them existing with GPL licenses - I suggested adding it during v3 ratification, but they did not feel there was a need (there are several clauses that make them not applicable), so if you write GPL plugins, I suggest moving to another license because the one you're using is not valid.
True, but what they did by naming it that was give a big middle finger to the people fighting against free speech and say we have the right to tell people how to do this, whether it's legal to do or not - this is the same time frame as other free speech wars were also being fought (like pornography), so it is very significant for its time.
The BBS version dates to the early 80s (for certain 1981 - I had a borrowed modem and 48k Apple ][ that summer, though I'm not 100% certain that was the huge 336 page one I printed by 1983 -- and I'm sure it got bigger). It had a lot more techie stuff than the printed copy I saw years later (for instance phone phreaking boxes, hacked modem lines like the pentagon press server, etc).
Well about 1981 I got a hold of a 336 page printable copy floating around the BBS world. In 1981 I was not much older than your son, and around 1983 (pretty sure we got our printer in 1983 - we also got a non-loaner modem that year) I almost got suspended from school for bringing a couple of pages to school. It didn't help that another kid photocopied them and started selling them in the library... then fingered me as his source, the cops got called, my parents got called, etc - incidentally, I mainly brought them because of the killer smoke bomb of potassium nitrate and sugar that I wanted to show another kid, and the one that they terrified the principal didn't even work (potassium permanganate and gasoline - in the late 1970s a neutralizing agent was added to pure potassium permanganate fish tank cleaner to slow its reaction with gasoline, and pure permanganate is harder to get now).
Scary that I even remember the ingredients... but my day with the police and the principal scared the beejesus out of me, so much so that I became much more careful with just about everything. I admit, before I was 16 or so I committed a lot of white collar crime (hacking in the bad sense, phreaking, piracy, etc) with my parents largely ignorant of it. Funny how now I'm very much against the crimes I perpetrated back then, and most of the people I associated with are too (in fact, the two I keep in contact with are an MIT trained professor and a guy with a doctorate in physics who works for Alcatel-Lucent).
Not quite - they are accused of pyronecrobestiality, though the assaulter a male "reporter" and victim was burning dead female wallaby.
It's true - you heard it first from Slashdot, which never contains factual errors.
I think of it this way - Nintendo is a publisher more than anything, though they do some development. A publisher makes most of their money through brick-and-mortar sales (about 15%-25% of a game's cost, I believe - traditional brick-and-mortar is 50% of the markup, but that is usually lower for games, but printing, distribution, and marketing consume a lot of the cost), and digital distribution can bypass them entirely.
wow - all that and no mention of MS-DOS and MS-Windows - true that MS-DOS was purchased and was a sloppy CP/M clone, but you have to admire the redirecting of the lawsuits to the creator and running them into the ground while profiting all the way.
As for Windows, it was a copy of MacOS, which itself was a copy of Xerox, and like many copies of copies, a lot was lost in translation, especially in early versions, and much of that wasn't fixed until well after Windows 3.11 (3.11 was the first "acceptable" version of Windows, IMO, and 95 was the first usable version - then there was that giant mis-step called Windows ME...).
yeah - it's a shame that Minnesota first spun off MECC as a private company in budget cuts, and TLC mainly bought them for assets. An ex-employee I knew in the 1990s said TLC was a horrible company to work for compared to MECC, and morale was bad from day 1 after the purchase.
In 1978 there was a computer version of it for Apple ][, and by 1980 it even had graphics.
Admittedly, not all schools had computers in 1984, and heck, I would say technology digressed as I went through school - in elementary school we had an open lab with at first an 8k Apple ][, and by the time I left they had a dozen 64k Apple ][e machines. My Jr High had an 8k Apple ][ for all 3 years and didn't get any new computers until 2 years after I left (then they opened a computer lab with a dozen IBM PCs). My high school had a locked lab of IBM PCs entirely used for a typing course, and they didn't add a computer course until about 3 years after I left (intro to computers). Fortunately, my high school electronics class teacher was much more open minded about computers and had 4 of them he purchased himself for student use in his lab.
In college it digressed more... a shared 6 1MHz processor mini-computer used by 400 students and I'd just barely missed the teletype. They did upgrade the labs extensively my second year in college (we even got a mac lab with color macs - great for pr0n).
for clarification on your post, the PowerVR SGX540 is a 4 core version, not 4 chips. PowerVR has an 8 core chip as well that can push 5x the triangles and has 4x the fill rate, but that probably consumed too much power (they may not have the power reqs of phones, but they still have reqs).
My guess is they went with PowerVR because they had the fastest GPU that wasn't only a system-on-a-chip. Snapdragon Adreno's performance numbers are pretty bad comparably (they are geared more to battery life), and nVidia Tegra is a system-on-a-chip and only dual Cortex A9 CPUs, not quad. Graphics are still pretty heavy CPU loads on modern smartphones, but as shader architectures like OpenGL 2 ES are adopted, I expect more of this work to be offloaded onto the chip.
Germany has something similar, and as I recall it is per-monitor (including computer) as well. Supposedly it is to keep the number of commercials down, but I hear it doesn't help much.
My big question is since you can do the same thing with any proxy server, does that make proxy servers illegal as well?
The FCC has a role, and despite sucking in a lot of ways and doing a lot of stupid things I disagree with, they do keep regulated monopolies and virtual monopolies from destroying competition with anti-competitive practices.
In this case, it is a virtual monopoly, Verizon (Verizon owns most of the east coast phone businesses making it a virtual but not absolute monopoly there), wanting to be able to prioritize its net traffic above others, which is, of course, in their best interest because they can then strangle competition (why watch netFlix over your high speed FiOS when you could watch verizonTube and have 99.9999996% faster streams?). Any company that can fsck its competition will - it is the nature of business.
I haven't seen Playboy in years, either, but as I recall, it doesn't even show snatch, so outside of the Americas (and particularly the US and Canada), it is nothing more than what you see at the beach and on TV already.
Hardcore pornography OTOH, is classified as art in California, but definitely illegal to film in other states (I've read about people getting arrested filming it in my state - they had a permit to make a film, but pron is not allowed), so I'd say the definition varies widely.
Yep, and also what isn't mentioned is that Douglas Gentile, the lead publisher of the paper, is the former director of research for the National Institute for Media and the Family an anti-video game group that has since dissolved. That group was given an "F" by the ESRB for "inaccuracies, incomplete and misleading statements, omission of material facts, and flawed research."
I've called out this guy's "research" as flawed multiple times - how does this prove that video games cause depression? It doesn't - you can't tell whether the depression is caused by excessive video games or if depressed people tend to play more video games. This guy's a quack and nothing is proven here.
you missed country music.
Joking aside, video games are a pariah, and the main reason they are targeted is because of the interactive nature of them. But if you read page 22 of this you will find that books and movies are MORE influential than video games. And what is the #1 behavior? Self published violent writings, which Jared L Loughner did in spades.
ATI really never put much effort into Linux support until 2009, when they finally started putting EXT extensions into consumer graphics cards instead of only into the highly marked up FireGL cards that target CAD. I quit using their cards for lack of EXT, especially display lists (a feature of OpenGL 1.5 - 1.4 with display list EXT support was the minimum hardware requirement). I still haven't tried OpenGL on their cards due to their past history and reportedly very buggy Linux drivers (and I do cross platform work both at my day job and open source projects, so I'm intimately familiar with the obstacles of cross platform).
WebM is a container - specifically a Matroska container, hence the name - but in this case it refers to specific contents of a VP8 (Google bought the company that owned the patents and released the codec royalty free) video codec and a Vorbis audio codec rather than the variety of formats the container supports.
Or by the bizarre licensing - you can't legally encode or decode H.264 without paying a royalty in the US, but if it is internet video, they will never go after the end user for encoding or decoding it. Isn't that a lot like saying you can't grow, buy, or sell pot without committing a felony, but you can smoke any you happen to have in public without consequence?
Rote is a great way to force ideas into people's heads, whether true or not. Religion has done that for generations (and by that, I mean some religion has to be wrong, if not every religion, otherwise they would all be the same).
The GIF debacle really should be called the LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welsh) debacle. GIF used the compression algorithm LZW because limited palate color table images could be compressed quickly and with fairly decent compression. Sperry, the owner of LZW allowed the patent to be used without fees and it became widely adopted (for instance, the UNIX tools compress and uncompress use it). When Unisys bought Sperry and were desperate for income, they went after everyone using any patents owned by Sperry, but the most well known one was LZW.
Arithmetic coding was used to go after JPEG, which used a hybrid of Huffman and arithmetic coding, but the workaround was for the compressing tools to just use Huffman until the patents expired. BZip2 also uses Huffman because of patent concerns about arithmetic coding (and there are some 70 odd patent, if not more on arithmetic coding, most of which are expired).
"one click" was and still is silly, as it was already widely used in a variety of applications and very obvious. It was lame that they were allowed to revise that patent to be e-commerce specific because the prior art was very similar to e-commerce.
This patent seems silly as well, because it is basically patenting something people have done using pen and paper for years. It annoys me as much as patents on Navier Stokes equations that were just reimplementing expired software patents on graphics hardware (and if they sue for my implementations, I will definitely use these as prior art).
I played Fallout 1 and 2 when they were new, and the biggest flaw was the load times and the stupid AI (in FO1 especially), which could be 45 minutes on a 2x drive. A later patch allowed moving most of the media to hard disk and between that and getting an 8x CD drive I thought both games were fantastic. Fallout 2 was my favorite game for about 5 years, as well, and I played through it dozens of times (male, female, smart, dumb, lucky, unlucky etc). I'm not saying FO3 wasn't fun, but I found it a fun shooter and a shallow role playing experience. IMO, Bethesda games are like Porno - a shallow plot and they jump right to the action with lots of tiny climaxes (quests) and more action (fighting), whereas something like Mass Effect is more like a mainstream movie - you have a dramatic, deep plot that climaxes at the end.
I finally realized while playing Fallout 3: New Vegas why the role playing part of FO3 felt so shallow when playing the game a second time as a female character. She screwed Benny, and when the screen faded to black there were dialog options - in FO3 you instantly appeared next to the bed fully clothed as if nothing had happened, which fails to even create the illusion that anything had happened (in FO2 text pretty much always appeared after the fade to black and before it faded back in). It was then that I realized FO3 had the same problem as Oblivion - it was shallow and lacked any sort of personality or character interaction in any sort of personal way. FO3 New Vegas had a bit more of this IMO with interpersonal dialogs with NPCs, but they were still very shallow compared to, say, any Bioware title.
The only problem with the factions in fallout 3 that I had was that if I kill 5 powder gangers and nobody is around to see it, how did they know I did it? Are they dusting my shell casings? It seemed a bit like the factions in Morrowind - if I backstab someone, how did the factions figure it out? Divination? I could see that happening if I were, say, bragging about it in a bar, but I don't do that in the game. Personally, I think the best implementation of factions was in Gothic (the first one), the fighting sucked but the factions and role playing were excellent. That was another series where the lead designer bolted before the second game (actually before the first was complete, but it was mostly done).
I would disagree with the external engine thing, as well, as my favorite shooter ever was technically an external engine (Unreal Tournament 2004, and no, I didn't really like UT or UT3). Unreal Engine (3 in this case) definitely seems to buck that issue, as seen in this list (from wikipedia):
America's Army 3
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Borderlands
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
BlackSite: Area 51
Gears of War
Gears of War 2
Unreal Tournament 3
Rainbow Six Vegas
Splinter Cell: Conviction
Lost Odyssey
Mass Effect
Mass Effect 2
The Last Remnant
Medal of Honor: Airborne
Blade and Soul
Bulletstorm
All of these reuse the same engine, and many are very good titles. So what happened with Gamebryo? Well, back when they were licensed by Bethesda for Oblivion 8+ years ago, it was called NetImmerse and it was one of the best role playing game engines on the market. Unreal and ID tech were still pretty much shooter only (and ID tech still is), and the competition was paltry in the 3D realms (lots of 2D and isometric). Over the years, Unreal has rewritten as hardware integration has changed and NetImmerse/Gamebryo just tacked on features without a badly needed core rewrite (that is my opinion from a few years ago, but I doubt much has changed). It would have been foolish for Bethesda to choose Gamebryo today - in fact, Gamebryo's parent company laid off most of their staff months ago and recently sold the assets to a Korean company, as I recall.
As for #4, it was probably a reference to Guild Wars 2, which is supposedly eliminating the holy trinity of MMOs: Tank, DPS, and Healer. While there will still be some reliance on DPS, movement seems to be much more important than tanking from what I saw of the demo.