With our government? Yes. Yes, it really is so much to ask.
For what it's worth, though, the political motives behind this bill are probably to make it look like Bush+co had one monumental fuckup right at the end of his term rather than a career-full of not-quite-as-monumental fuckups scattered throughout.
Of course, I'd argue (and most slashdotters, it seems, would agree with me) that his annihilating privacy and freedom were far worse on the whole, but everyone in the country is going to personally feel this one whereas most ignorant people could have successfully ignored most of the other political blunders if they tried hard enough.
As a Mac owner I agree that the Air is completely stupid for 99% of the people, and probably would have never made it to market if the eee had come out a little earlier.
But how about you stop your fucking trolling and not bring Apple into a discussion where they're completely irrelevant./just got a sandwich, can afford to tear off a bit to feed the trolls.
"world otherwise coded for Active-X"? Maybe in some decrepit intranet applications, but outside of Microsoft.com I don't think I've seen a need for ActiveX in at least three years. Probably five.
Then again, that might be due to the fact that I've been using !IE since Firefox ~0.80. I think they were still having the naming debates back then, in fact.
Either you have approximately three libraries of congress worth of data, or a very cheap cell phone bill. S3 storage is pretty cheap considering the redundancy and offsite and all that good stuff - 15c/GB-month, and 10c/GB for transfer in. So up to about 30GB of so worth of stored data, it's cheaper than Mozy ($5/mo), but I'd need to be storing over 400GB-month of data plus a good chunk of rsync transfer bandwidth before it would cost as much as my cell line.
And given the cell reception I get in S. Bumfuckville, NH, it'd probably be a much better investment.
Most servers are going to have some sort of monthly charge associated with them. A co-lo will charge you out the wazoo for this kind of thing - remember, rack space is expensive. Cheap hosts that offer plenty of oversold storage (they tend to be more concerned about CPU cycles though, so using it as a remote drive probably wouldn't be an issue) don't typically give you SSH access, and anything beyond a cheap host and you might as well just go for S3/jungledisk unless you have a tremendous shit-ton of data in which case just buy a couple of Drobos and befriend a UPS guy and a relative in a different state. With 1.5TB drives hitting the market, you can pack about 4TB of drive-failure-safe storage in each unit. But honestly if you have those kinds of redundant+offsite storage needs, you're probably not asking Slashdot how to achieve it.
No, but it does change their place in the market. Yahoo goes from being a search, ad, and content provider to solely a content provider (one which, like the rest of the internet, uses AdSense as its primary source of income). Not only does it strengthen both companies, but it lowers the hostility between them - Google gets to focus on search and ad targeting, and Yahoo gets to focus on gaudy design to wrap around information aggregated from other sources (again, like the rest of the internet).
It just so happens that Yahoo, as the #1 site on the internet (not sure on the metric, probably time spent there per day, as I expect google would beat them on uniques), tends to do this a lot more effectively than anyone else, and as such is able to bring in a lot more money with AdSense than anyone else.
However, judging by the comments here, they seem to be losing their enthusiasm! just! a! bit!
Someone just flunked out of Verizon Math. Even if you're using old-school billion with the milliard intermediary between 1,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000.
But even still, for a million bucks a year, I'd find some way to navigate using that thing that Microsoft calls a search engine.
Other than furthering Google's market cap on internet advertising and pushing them closer to a practical monopoly (there will always be competition, but none that really competes on any large scale), is that really a problem? Yahoo's page views won't change at all, and chances are that $googleAdSenseRevenue > ($yahooAdSales - $yahooAdSalesOverhead - $yahooAdPayouts). If AdSense keeps the rest of the internet afloat, why should Yahoo have to feel left out?
Truth be told, having a "Google Custom Search" logo in the Yahoo search box might do a bit of harm to branding, but most of the people using Yahoo are using it as a home page (sports, weather, news) rather than primarily as a search engine. In my limited observations, at least. If Google made their iGoogle pages a bit more obvious, they could probably have Yahoo dead within a week.
Dropbox is absolutely fantastic as a sync tool (and also has some degree of versioning), but there's no practical way as of yet to make it into a full-system backup. When 'watch folders' show up, it'll get a lot closer, but like any web-based system, it becomes impractically slow for anyone dealing with lot of data. Even digital snapshots add up quickly with the resolution of the point-and-shoot cameras, never mind if there's an actual photographer shooting RAW.
No Linux client, AFAIK (though I do run it on my MBP). It's become rather impractical for me as a photographer though, as sometimes I'll shoot enough photos that my internet connection would be completely maxed out for days on end trying to sync up the new data - and I have a decent-for-cable 1Mbps upload rate.
rsync to Amazon S3 might be an option, if only for cross-platform capabilities. No versioning though, but outside of Apple's Time Machine (obviously useless for Windows and Linux), you're not going to get that without some major headache. Any remote system is going to be horribly slow for the first sync with any typical internet connection, and quite possibly problematically slow for photographers, media horaders, and in general people with big hard drives.
You wouldn't get damages for violating the terms of the contract directly, but not following the terms of the contract means that you are in violation of the copyright that's held by the original author(s). Open-source software is made available for free by the copyright holder provided that you follow certain conditions. As soon as you're no longer following those conditions, then the author(s) have every right to sue for copyright infringement.
Getting damages for copyright violation is another story entirely. Unless you explicitly registered your copyright (not just put a copyright notice, but actually sent a copy along with some processing fee to some government agency), the damages you can get are fairly limited. It's pretty safe to assume that almost no open-source projects have done this - maybe a couple of the really big ones that actually have some sort of revenue source (MySQL comes to mind as a possibility).
The court here is simply being asked to determine whether violating an open source license agreement constitutes copyright infringement.
How could it not? All open-source licenses (that I'm aware of, at least) say that the copyright remains with the original author(s), but you have reproduction rights provided you follow X conditions. If you fail to follow those conditions, then you're in violation of copyright. It tends to be stated pretty clearly and explicitly, despite what other confusion legal jargon may be present that states those conditions.
Seems to me that any court, judge, or legal official that doesn't understand that should be in no position to make legal judgments.
Of course if you use something as liberal as the MIT license, for example, you might as well have given up your copyright. It's effectively Public Domain with Attribution. But the first line is "Copyright (c) 2008 Firehed", for example, and ended with "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software" before the don't-sue-me disclaimer. For all of the grey area that exists within our legal system, that seems pretty damn clear.
Obviously, this varies from OS license to OS license, but as a general rule the only variation between the difference open source licenses are the conditions under which you're allowed to use/change/(re)distribute the software. They all seem to have some similar variant of the above copyright notice and warranty disclaimer. But IANAL, nor have I gone through all of the licenses word-for-word.
I miss the days when you could actually do that as a teacher. Which wasn't long ago really - I got to participate in a similar demonstration in middle school (7th grade?), and I'm only in my early 20s now.
It's not painful, just really bizarre. More of a weird prickling. It's just a lot of static electricity after all - high voltage with no amperage at all, completely harmless. The trick was to make sure your palms had good contact with your neighbor, since it was only when the static jumped through open air when you felt it.
Which, for the record, is just a flaky version* of DynDNS + VNC (specifying the vnc:// protocol in the OS X Connect To Server dialog box uses the same built-in "Screen Sharing" client). You do have to explicitly turn on Back To My Mac access in System Prefs though, it's not automatic.
*Typically the router's fault, but opening the ports manually always works better than UPNP/NAT-PMP anyways.
Most remote desktop programs have an observe-only mode (alternately, just don't move the mouse or type), and it's not likely that many thieves would realize what's stealing their bandwidth.
He probably didn't have a login password or set his system to auto log-in. It's pretty typical for home users.
My father has been working with Helium Ion Microscopes for a few years now - not the same as helium atoms of course, but the goals are the same (avoiding damage to the sample, improved resolution, firing a single concentrated beam of atoms instead of spewing electrons, etc). And they're... beta. Improving, but decidedly beta.
Very few people are going to be willing to pay more for faster access - the few who do already are, the vast majority of internet users are still just doing web browsing and email, which really doesn't improve all that much with faster broadband.
That may be true today, but once you start considering high-bandwidth content (480p+ video, etc) and it's rapid growth since the availability of broadband, the demand for even faster connections will absolutely go up. With companies like Apple, Amazon, and even NBC completely legitimizing the practice thanks to iTunes, Unbox, and Hulu respectively and indeed pushing their online services, the need and desire is there. Granted NBC and the other big TV companies are a lot slower to adopt, but they are catching on and they have a hell of an influence once they REALLY start pushing it.
Of course the ISPs would absolutely hate this. Not only would it increase their bandwidth and infrastructure costs, but many of them are also TV service providers (all of the cable ISPs, and probably some of the bigger DSL companies) and that would directly target not only their cable revenues but also other services like TiVo. This heads towards the whole net neutrality issue, since content-providing ISPs would without question have financial incentive to throttle (for example) Youtube and Revver in favor of either Hulu/etc or their own tv.comcast.com type of thing.
I think (and certainly hope) that a good portion of that time is really just "TV on as background noise". I don't think there are enough hours in the day for anyone with a job to actually WATCH 6 hours of TV a day. Hell, I'm a freelancer working at home and I couldn't find nearly that much time to sit on my ass doing nothing *cough*slashdotdoesntcount*cough* if I wanted to, not that I do.
Of course, the only shows I watch that are on regularly are the Colbert Report and the Daily Show, which is about 45 minutes total four times a week (yay Hulu and fairly short commercials and no longer having to screw around with bittorrent), just over 2.5 hrs. I'll also watch BSG and Mythbusters when new episodes are out, which would equate to about another 45min/show when they're out, not more than once a week. And I only watch either just before bed or first thing in the morning, depending on when the shows hit my RSS reader (and whether I've been working until 5am again), so I'm not really losing time that could be otherwise spent on something particularly meaningful.
The idea of watching TV taking up the same amount of time as a full-time job just blows my mind. And it explains a decent amount about people's priorities and why we're dealing with all of this economic nonsense.
Hardly. 1D barcode means the standard barcodes you see everywhere - the bars are only significant in one dimension (width) so they're considered 1D. They're also designed to be pretty damn resilient, scalable, and many codes (EAN-13, for instance) also have a checksum bit. Code 39 follows a similar concept while allowing for alphanumeric codes.
In any case, all of the 1D barcodes are completely height-insensitive. It's the bar spacing and thickness that come into play, and since it's all based around a multiplier of sorts (UPC/EAN codes have bars of exactly 1x, 2x, 3x, or 4x the thickness of the end bars, which can only safely be within a certain range), it doesn't matter if you scan it at an angle or completely perpendicular to the bars, how tall the bar set is, and isn't too picky about being on curved surfaces.
The problem is that most phone cameras have appallingly bad low-light performance, and that's where this application would generally be used. Decoding the barcode is a fairly simple process, but if the image of the code is noisy as hell (as it will tend to be on phone cameras), the apparent width of the different bars could end up being completely unpredictable.
The problem becomes a hundred times worse with 2d barcodes (datamatrixes), like those that you see on UPS shipping labels. While the scaling issues are about the same, there's much more encoded data to get screwed up by a bad imaging system.
However, seeing that we're primarily talking about fairly short numeric codes and a PHONE as an input device, this whole problem is easily solved with the built-in keypad. It may not be quite as sleek, but it's certainly more reliable.
On the other hand, I've simply stopped buying anything at release in favor of letting someone ELSE determine whether I'll need a crack to run it successfully. If that's the case, I won't buy it. I'm sick of dealing with companies at any level that feel the need to go crazy with copy protection, whether it's genuinely a flawed attempt at anti-piracy, an attempt to kill second-hand sales, or they're just a bunch of douche bags.
Games are supposed to be fun. Cracking stuff, to me, isn't fun, nor is fighting with games in order to get them to play. So companies that employ technologies that take away fun from my gaming experience no longer get my money.
I have no problem with a serial key (even though I own plenty of older games that are STILL fun which just installed with no key to speak of) but I'm not messing around with activation, low-level driver installations that screw up my system as a whole (securom, etc), etc. Saves me a lot of headache and stops me from supporting developers that I don't want to support.
Seems a little crazy to me fighting with a game for three hours to get it playing (and THEN try to find graphics settings that work fine) when it'll only deliver 6-8 hours of gameplay, which seems to be about all we can expect from single-player campaigns these days.
You expect that the CEO of a DRM company wouldn't suggest that his product is necessary for everyone? We know that not using DRM only threatens HIS company's business model, but DRM has been ineffective from the start, and has only served to inconvenience paying customers. Nobody doesn't know this by now - it really only exists to kill off second-hand sales and because of some misguided decisions from some ignorant CEOs.
Snake oil or not, it'll probably be around for a while longer until it's made clear that only products without DRM succeed in the market. I'm doing my part. Are you?
They stopped calling them 'laptops' in favor of 'notebooks' years ago for precisely this reason. Granted I'm typing this from a MBP that's doing a fine job to keep my nuts warm (through a blanket so I don't actually burn my legs), but the computer industry has long since accepted that the devices almost universally are too hot to be marketed as a laptop computer.
Collapsing a shack full of enemies with a grenade or a melee attack in strength mode is always satisfying, and I think it qualifies as a physics-based opportunity to kill enemies.
And while it wasn't unique to Crysis, I found lobbing a grenade under a moving vehicle awesomely satisfying. I must have it it just right, because it went off right as the truck was coming around a bend, prompting said truck to perform about three barrel rolls fifteen feet in the air sending it off the edge of the cliff. You can take out vehicles with grenades in any game, but that explosion was, pardon my french, fucking awesome.
Shooting down trees on enemies works OK too, but it's better as a demo of the engine than a practical tactic.
Re:What the problem with Gmail?
on
Good Email For Kids?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I normally don't bite on the "think of the children" attitude, but goatse... plenty of adults have been permanently scarred from that. I'd hate to think what it would do to a five-year-old. For all you know, he might take it as a challenge, which would be, uhh, not a good thing. This isn't normal porn we're talking about, here (if you could call goatse porn... I can't think of a better word, but I sure as hell don't want to meet someone who gets off to that kind of thing).
Seriously, five-year-olds should be playing outside with friends. I first started using a computer when I was four or five, but it was considerably longer until it was unsupervised. Granted this was on an old AT system with 2 5.25" floppies as boot disks and no GUI to speak of (let alone an internet connection) so I probably couldn't even reach the power switch around the back of the thing without help, and the biggest danger to me was falling off a chair trying. In any case, it was something I played around with once in a while but that was it. I didn't start using email until middle school.
Don't get me wrong, it's definitely something to learn. But be a parent about it - just because the danger from getting a weird email at that age is much less than talking to some pervert with the van and candy doesn't mean you should ignore the former. Whitelisting is a VERY appropriate solution for someone that age.
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With our government? Yes. Yes, it really is so much to ask.
For what it's worth, though, the political motives behind this bill are probably to make it look like Bush+co had one monumental fuckup right at the end of his term rather than a career-full of not-quite-as-monumental fuckups scattered throughout.
Of course, I'd argue (and most slashdotters, it seems, would agree with me) that his annihilating privacy and freedom were far worse on the whole, but everyone in the country is going to personally feel this one whereas most ignorant people could have successfully ignored most of the other political blunders if they tried hard enough.
Oh wonderful. Not only does my movie break because of some crashed server off in Paramountland, but it breaks because it can't show me an ad.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
My decision to eschew Blu-ray in favor of downloads/not supporting assholes seems better by the day.
As a Mac owner I agree that the Air is completely stupid for 99% of the people, and probably would have never made it to market if the eee had come out a little earlier.
But how about you stop your fucking trolling and not bring Apple into a discussion where they're completely irrelevant. /just got a sandwich, can afford to tear off a bit to feed the trolls.
"world otherwise coded for Active-X"? Maybe in some decrepit intranet applications, but outside of Microsoft.com I don't think I've seen a need for ActiveX in at least three years. Probably five.
Then again, that might be due to the fact that I've been using !IE since Firefox ~0.80. I think they were still having the naming debates back then, in fact.
Either you have approximately three libraries of congress worth of data, or a very cheap cell phone bill. S3 storage is pretty cheap considering the redundancy and offsite and all that good stuff - 15c/GB-month, and 10c/GB for transfer in. So up to about 30GB of so worth of stored data, it's cheaper than Mozy ($5/mo), but I'd need to be storing over 400GB-month of data plus a good chunk of rsync transfer bandwidth before it would cost as much as my cell line.
And given the cell reception I get in S. Bumfuckville, NH, it'd probably be a much better investment.
Most servers are going to have some sort of monthly charge associated with them. A co-lo will charge you out the wazoo for this kind of thing - remember, rack space is expensive. Cheap hosts that offer plenty of oversold storage (they tend to be more concerned about CPU cycles though, so using it as a remote drive probably wouldn't be an issue) don't typically give you SSH access, and anything beyond a cheap host and you might as well just go for S3/jungledisk unless you have a tremendous shit-ton of data in which case just buy a couple of Drobos and befriend a UPS guy and a relative in a different state. With 1.5TB drives hitting the market, you can pack about 4TB of drive-failure-safe storage in each unit. But honestly if you have those kinds of redundant+offsite storage needs, you're probably not asking Slashdot how to achieve it.
No, but it does change their place in the market. Yahoo goes from being a search, ad, and content provider to solely a content provider (one which, like the rest of the internet, uses AdSense as its primary source of income). Not only does it strengthen both companies, but it lowers the hostility between them - Google gets to focus on search and ad targeting, and Yahoo gets to focus on gaudy design to wrap around information aggregated from other sources (again, like the rest of the internet).
It just so happens that Yahoo, as the #1 site on the internet (not sure on the metric, probably time spent there per day, as I expect google would beat them on uniques), tends to do this a lot more effectively than anyone else, and as such is able to bring in a lot more money with AdSense than anyone else.
However, judging by the comments here, they seem to be losing their enthusiasm! just! a! bit!
Someone just flunked out of Verizon Math. Even if you're using old-school billion with the milliard intermediary between 1,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000.
But even still, for a million bucks a year, I'd find some way to navigate using that thing that Microsoft calls a search engine.
Other than furthering Google's market cap on internet advertising and pushing them closer to a practical monopoly (there will always be competition, but none that really competes on any large scale), is that really a problem? Yahoo's page views won't change at all, and chances are that $googleAdSenseRevenue > ($yahooAdSales - $yahooAdSalesOverhead - $yahooAdPayouts). If AdSense keeps the rest of the internet afloat, why should Yahoo have to feel left out?
Truth be told, having a "Google Custom Search" logo in the Yahoo search box might do a bit of harm to branding, but most of the people using Yahoo are using it as a home page (sports, weather, news) rather than primarily as a search engine. In my limited observations, at least. If Google made their iGoogle pages a bit more obvious, they could probably have Yahoo dead within a week.
Dropbox is absolutely fantastic as a sync tool (and also has some degree of versioning), but there's no practical way as of yet to make it into a full-system backup. When 'watch folders' show up, it'll get a lot closer, but like any web-based system, it becomes impractically slow for anyone dealing with lot of data. Even digital snapshots add up quickly with the resolution of the point-and-shoot cameras, never mind if there's an actual photographer shooting RAW.
No Linux client, AFAIK (though I do run it on my MBP). It's become rather impractical for me as a photographer though, as sometimes I'll shoot enough photos that my internet connection would be completely maxed out for days on end trying to sync up the new data - and I have a decent-for-cable 1Mbps upload rate.
rsync to Amazon S3 might be an option, if only for cross-platform capabilities. No versioning though, but outside of Apple's Time Machine (obviously useless for Windows and Linux), you're not going to get that without some major headache. Any remote system is going to be horribly slow for the first sync with any typical internet connection, and quite possibly problematically slow for photographers, media horaders, and in general people with big hard drives.
You wouldn't get damages for violating the terms of the contract directly, but not following the terms of the contract means that you are in violation of the copyright that's held by the original author(s). Open-source software is made available for free by the copyright holder provided that you follow certain conditions. As soon as you're no longer following those conditions, then the author(s) have every right to sue for copyright infringement.
Getting damages for copyright violation is another story entirely. Unless you explicitly registered your copyright (not just put a copyright notice, but actually sent a copy along with some processing fee to some government agency), the damages you can get are fairly limited. It's pretty safe to assume that almost no open-source projects have done this - maybe a couple of the really big ones that actually have some sort of revenue source (MySQL comes to mind as a possibility).
IANAL.
The court here is simply being asked to determine whether violating an open source license agreement constitutes copyright infringement.
How could it not? All open-source licenses (that I'm aware of, at least) say that the copyright remains with the original author(s), but you have reproduction rights provided you follow X conditions. If you fail to follow those conditions, then you're in violation of copyright. It tends to be stated pretty clearly and explicitly, despite what other confusion legal jargon may be present that states those conditions.
Seems to me that any court, judge, or legal official that doesn't understand that should be in no position to make legal judgments.
Of course if you use something as liberal as the MIT license, for example, you might as well have given up your copyright. It's effectively Public Domain with Attribution. But the first line is "Copyright (c) 2008 Firehed", for example, and ended with "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software" before the don't-sue-me disclaimer. For all of the grey area that exists within our legal system, that seems pretty damn clear.
Obviously, this varies from OS license to OS license, but as a general rule the only variation between the difference open source licenses are the conditions under which you're allowed to use/change/(re)distribute the software. They all seem to have some similar variant of the above copyright notice and warranty disclaimer. But IANAL, nor have I gone through all of the licenses word-for-word.
I miss the days when you could actually do that as a teacher. Which wasn't long ago really - I got to participate in a similar demonstration in middle school (7th grade?), and I'm only in my early 20s now.
It's not painful, just really bizarre. More of a weird prickling. It's just a lot of static electricity after all - high voltage with no amperage at all, completely harmless. The trick was to make sure your palms had good contact with your neighbor, since it was only when the static jumped through open air when you felt it.
Which, for the record, is just a flaky version* of DynDNS + VNC (specifying the vnc:// protocol in the OS X Connect To Server dialog box uses the same built-in "Screen Sharing" client). You do have to explicitly turn on Back To My Mac access in System Prefs though, it's not automatic.
*Typically the router's fault, but opening the ports manually always works better than UPNP/NAT-PMP anyways.
Most remote desktop programs have an observe-only mode (alternately, just don't move the mouse or type), and it's not likely that many thieves would realize what's stealing their bandwidth.
He probably didn't have a login password or set his system to auto log-in. It's pretty typical for home users.
My father has been working with Helium Ion Microscopes for a few years now - not the same as helium atoms of course, but the goals are the same (avoiding damage to the sample, improved resolution, firing a single concentrated beam of atoms instead of spewing electrons, etc). And they're... beta. Improving, but decidedly beta.
Very few people are going to be willing to pay more for faster access - the few who do already are, the vast majority of internet users are still just doing web browsing and email, which really doesn't improve all that much with faster broadband.
That may be true today, but once you start considering high-bandwidth content (480p+ video, etc) and it's rapid growth since the availability of broadband, the demand for even faster connections will absolutely go up. With companies like Apple, Amazon, and even NBC completely legitimizing the practice thanks to iTunes, Unbox, and Hulu respectively and indeed pushing their online services, the need and desire is there. Granted NBC and the other big TV companies are a lot slower to adopt, but they are catching on and they have a hell of an influence once they REALLY start pushing it.
Of course the ISPs would absolutely hate this. Not only would it increase their bandwidth and infrastructure costs, but many of them are also TV service providers (all of the cable ISPs, and probably some of the bigger DSL companies) and that would directly target not only their cable revenues but also other services like TiVo. This heads towards the whole net neutrality issue, since content-providing ISPs would without question have financial incentive to throttle (for example) Youtube and Revver in favor of either Hulu/etc or their own tv.comcast.com type of thing.
8 DVDs at a time? Jesus. They might as well just give you sftp access to their ~/Movies folder and save you the trouble of re-ripping everything.
I think (and certainly hope) that a good portion of that time is really just "TV on as background noise". I don't think there are enough hours in the day for anyone with a job to actually WATCH 6 hours of TV a day. Hell, I'm a freelancer working at home and I couldn't find nearly that much time to sit on my ass doing nothing *cough*slashdotdoesntcount*cough* if I wanted to, not that I do.
Of course, the only shows I watch that are on regularly are the Colbert Report and the Daily Show, which is about 45 minutes total four times a week (yay Hulu and fairly short commercials and no longer having to screw around with bittorrent), just over 2.5 hrs. I'll also watch BSG and Mythbusters when new episodes are out, which would equate to about another 45min/show when they're out, not more than once a week. And I only watch either just before bed or first thing in the morning, depending on when the shows hit my RSS reader (and whether I've been working until 5am again), so I'm not really losing time that could be otherwise spent on something particularly meaningful.
The idea of watching TV taking up the same amount of time as a full-time job just blows my mind. And it explains a decent amount about people's priorities and why we're dealing with all of this economic nonsense.
Hardly. 1D barcode means the standard barcodes you see everywhere - the bars are only significant in one dimension (width) so they're considered 1D. They're also designed to be pretty damn resilient, scalable, and many codes (EAN-13, for instance) also have a checksum bit. Code 39 follows a similar concept while allowing for alphanumeric codes.
In any case, all of the 1D barcodes are completely height-insensitive. It's the bar spacing and thickness that come into play, and since it's all based around a multiplier of sorts (UPC/EAN codes have bars of exactly 1x, 2x, 3x, or 4x the thickness of the end bars, which can only safely be within a certain range), it doesn't matter if you scan it at an angle or completely perpendicular to the bars, how tall the bar set is, and isn't too picky about being on curved surfaces.
The problem is that most phone cameras have appallingly bad low-light performance, and that's where this application would generally be used. Decoding the barcode is a fairly simple process, but if the image of the code is noisy as hell (as it will tend to be on phone cameras), the apparent width of the different bars could end up being completely unpredictable.
The problem becomes a hundred times worse with 2d barcodes (datamatrixes), like those that you see on UPS shipping labels. While the scaling issues are about the same, there's much more encoded data to get screwed up by a bad imaging system.
However, seeing that we're primarily talking about fairly short numeric codes and a PHONE as an input device, this whole problem is easily solved with the built-in keypad. It may not be quite as sleek, but it's certainly more reliable.
On the other hand, I've simply stopped buying anything at release in favor of letting someone ELSE determine whether I'll need a crack to run it successfully. If that's the case, I won't buy it. I'm sick of dealing with companies at any level that feel the need to go crazy with copy protection, whether it's genuinely a flawed attempt at anti-piracy, an attempt to kill second-hand sales, or they're just a bunch of douche bags.
Games are supposed to be fun. Cracking stuff, to me, isn't fun, nor is fighting with games in order to get them to play. So companies that employ technologies that take away fun from my gaming experience no longer get my money.
I have no problem with a serial key (even though I own plenty of older games that are STILL fun which just installed with no key to speak of) but I'm not messing around with activation, low-level driver installations that screw up my system as a whole (securom, etc), etc. Saves me a lot of headache and stops me from supporting developers that I don't want to support.
Seems a little crazy to me fighting with a game for three hours to get it playing (and THEN try to find graphics settings that work fine) when it'll only deliver 6-8 hours of gameplay, which seems to be about all we can expect from single-player campaigns these days.
You expect that the CEO of a DRM company wouldn't suggest that his product is necessary for everyone? We know that not using DRM only threatens HIS company's business model, but DRM has been ineffective from the start, and has only served to inconvenience paying customers. Nobody doesn't know this by now - it really only exists to kill off second-hand sales and because of some misguided decisions from some ignorant CEOs.
Snake oil or not, it'll probably be around for a while longer until it's made clear that only products without DRM succeed in the market. I'm doing my part. Are you?
They stopped calling them 'laptops' in favor of 'notebooks' years ago for precisely this reason. Granted I'm typing this from a MBP that's doing a fine job to keep my nuts warm (through a blanket so I don't actually burn my legs), but the computer industry has long since accepted that the devices almost universally are too hot to be marketed as a laptop computer.
Collapsing a shack full of enemies with a grenade or a melee attack in strength mode is always satisfying, and I think it qualifies as a physics-based opportunity to kill enemies.
And while it wasn't unique to Crysis, I found lobbing a grenade under a moving vehicle awesomely satisfying. I must have it it just right, because it went off right as the truck was coming around a bend, prompting said truck to perform about three barrel rolls fifteen feet in the air sending it off the edge of the cliff. You can take out vehicles with grenades in any game, but that explosion was, pardon my french, fucking awesome.
Shooting down trees on enemies works OK too, but it's better as a demo of the engine than a practical tactic.
I normally don't bite on the "think of the children" attitude, but goatse... plenty of adults have been permanently scarred from that. I'd hate to think what it would do to a five-year-old. For all you know, he might take it as a challenge, which would be, uhh, not a good thing. This isn't normal porn we're talking about, here (if you could call goatse porn... I can't think of a better word, but I sure as hell don't want to meet someone who gets off to that kind of thing).
Seriously, five-year-olds should be playing outside with friends. I first started using a computer when I was four or five, but it was considerably longer until it was unsupervised. Granted this was on an old AT system with 2 5.25" floppies as boot disks and no GUI to speak of (let alone an internet connection) so I probably couldn't even reach the power switch around the back of the thing without help, and the biggest danger to me was falling off a chair trying. In any case, it was something I played around with once in a while but that was it. I didn't start using email until middle school.
Don't get me wrong, it's definitely something to learn. But be a parent about it - just because the danger from getting a weird email at that age is much less than talking to some pervert with the van and candy doesn't mean you should ignore the former. Whitelisting is a VERY appropriate solution for someone that age.