IE8 (or as an add-on to IE7, much like the extensions you mention) includes Developer Tools (look under Tools in the command bar, or press F12). It has a JavaScript debugger, tools for examining the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript source, a profiler, validation tools, and handy stuff like drawing outlines around individual elements or elements of a given class.
While not providing as much functionality as all the extensions you mention rolled together, it is nonetheless quite nice and excellent for examining pages or dealing with client-side scripts. The fact that it's built in is a nice bonus.
Actually, that was one of the things that drove me back to IE - it really is better at keeping each tab alive without making the current tab unusable. I'm not sure if it does some funky stuff with thread priorities or whatnot, but I can (and have) run down the Slashdot main page, middle-clickign every link that looks vaguely interesting, and ended up with 14 tabs loading in the background (and with D2, IE7 loads Slashdot articles quite slowly - though it's fast with IE8 beta 2). The main tab remains responsive, and I can watch as up to two tabs at a time (on my dual-core machine) finish loading along the tab bar. If I switch to a not-yet-loaded tab, it will come up as quickly as if I had clicked the link on the main page and opened it in the same tab.
First, does the "always clear my private data" feature allow it to, for example, NOT clear my Slashdot cookie? IE8's InPrivate clears THAT SESSION'S data, not just every temporary file the browser has.
Second, does it allow you to open multiple browser windows, one that is private and will be erased, and another that is normal? I typically have a browser session open for days if not weeks, and given that Firefox doesn't actually *end* until the very last Firefox window is closed, I rather doubt you'd be able to "privatize" one session without being forced to close the other as well.
As for the session restore, IE8 reloads automatically and instantly if it crashes (there's a separate process running that detects if the browser process dies), and if there's a specific page in the browser that is making it crash, it will attempt a few times to reload, and on the third try will stop attempting to load the offending tab (with a message explaining the problem).
Yeah, this was my first really impressive thing I saw with IE8, aside from passing Acid2. First, individual tabs can crash without bringing down the whole browser (something Firefox would do REALLY well to copy). Second, if (or, in the case of beta1, WHEN) the browser did entirely crash, it re-loaded instantly with all tabs. If one of the tabs caused it to crash again immediately (which I found one site that would cause this) it would try one more time, and on the third recovery would not load the offending page with a message stating that the page in that tab was causing the browser to crash and has not been reloaded for that reason. Very well implemented, and the whole process doesn't take very long at all.
Forensic data retrieval tools can pull files off your hard drive that you (thouhgt) you deleted months ago, or possibly longer, depsneding on how often a particular block gets overwritten. Of course, it needs physical disk access and expensive equipment, so Joe Average cerainly is NOT going to be getting to it - and that's all this feature is designed to protect against.
It keeps your spouse from knowing you bought a special gift for your anniversary. It keeps your dad from seeing the site a friend told you about at school (actually, Vista's parental controls may be able to prevent InPrivate mode). It keeps your female friend who comes over to visit from seeing the most common site you visit whose URL starts with an 'x'. All in all, it seems a smart and well-thought-up product. They should make it a start menu entry rather than just something you start after opening the browser (heck, if it is a command line switch you could make that the default mode), but it still seems pretty good.
Holy shit... it's actually faster than FF3 for Slashdot on my machine. Good scroll speed, good render time, and the AJAX comment posting system - even that period between when you click "Preview" and when it actually is ready to post - is instantaneous.
Still only gets 21/100 on Acid 3, but that's better than any previous IE version, including the beta 1.
Forensically cleaning storage (without destroying it) is certainly possible, but requires considerably more effort to do right than simply unlinking some temp files from the master file table. Given enough usage, my guess is that the data will become sufficiently overwritten to be unrecoverable, but that could take quite some time.
Note that after overwriting the data even once, I believe it takes physical access to the disk (not just the computer, but the actual disk inside of it) to do any recovery. It also require tools your average spouse/parent/burglar/script kiddie is not going to have.
On the other hand, if you've got something that you want to hide from authorities with serious data retrieval tools, you should be using a fully encrypted volume.
1: None of the platforms you mentioned are, as far as I know, running advertising campaigns that they can access "the whole Internet" (or even web) and as such, your point is not relevant to the discussion (which is whether the iPhone ad is valid and the response is appropriate).
2: I run x64 openSuse, and have done so for well over a year (since the release of either 10.2, on 11.0 now). Flash works fine in general. Pandora works fine. YouTube works fine. Dr. Horrible (Hulu player) worked fine.
I haven't tried using Moonlight yet, and I'm aware it's still incomplete. but then, nobody promised me I'd be able to view the Olympics site in Linux either - if they had, they'd quite possibly be in violation of Truth in Advertising regulations.
So, in a serious question, would anybody like to explain why this (InPrivate) is "bullshit"? The concept of storing all browsing history, cookies, and other temp. Internet files in a temporary storage that is lost forever when the browser closes sounds both perfectly reasonable and technologically sound. It's not like the concept of files which are deleted when their last handles are closed is new, and "treat all cookies as session cookies" is pretty easy too. Avoid writing browsing history and such into the standard storage for such things, and you've got a browsing session that, once it ends, leaves no traces recoverable without forensic tools.
From a software development standpoint, this neither sounds difficult nor unreasonable. The user starts IE with a command-line switch (normally via the Start menu). Said switch sets a global flag in the browser. All CreateFile calls that can actually create files (for the POSIX-only types out there, CreateFile is the Win32 equivalent of open(2)) now create the file as temporary only. Similarly, the browsing histroy, auto-complete, and so forth also go into temporary files. When the browser closes, those files are all deleted. It'd take some work - for example, what if two InPrivate sessions were started at the same time? - but does not sound particularly challenging, technologically.
Note that I'm only referring to the private browsing session feature, here - the one that *somebody* felt the need to call bullshit upon. Unless you claim that such a feature cannot, in fact, provide the protections suggested above (which is a valid position, should you choose to take it), you need to explain why the feature itself would not work.
The concept of blocking advertiser tricks which are silently impinging on user privacy is something else, and arguably quite cool - but not relevant to this post.
Stealing (literally) whatever we want, hurting people who get in our way, having sex with anybody we find desirable, and driving as fast as *you* feel safe doing (or faster, if you're an adrenaline junkie) are all human nature too. As are many other despicable things. Civilization is not built on embracing "human nature" nearly as much as it is built on *containing* it for the good of all of us.
If you want to argue that piracy, software or otherwise, benefits the community as a whole, I'll listen. If you want to quote some idealist, then put a downright out-of-touch-with-reality interpretation on it and justify that as "human nature", please go find somewhere else to do.
That's true with a lot of things, but not really with gaming. Games (like other multimedia apps) make a lot more use of lower-level stuff... which is often hardly portable at all. You can make a GTK+ GUI app and run it on any OS, but for games you're in a much trickier place. There's OpenGL, but from what I've heard it's a bit of a pain to use, and what are you going to do for audio? How about controller input other than mouse and keyboard? Even networking code needs some tweaking between OSes.
To put it differently, take a look at DirectX. All of it. Now, compare that to everything you need to do to make a game cross-platform. At that point, I wonder if it really isn't easier to just code to Wine/Crossover [Games/Mac]. You don't get the latest, cutting-edge APIs... but you probably can't get those anyhow if cross-platform is essential.
My main complaint about this is that you're installing executables from people of, at best, questionable morality. At least half the time somebody at school asks me to clean malware off their machine, it got there through a NoCD-type executable they downloaded off DC++.
Valve does seem to "get it" pretty well. Blizzard is moving this way as well, with legit NoCD patches, the ability to store your CD key online behind a username/password, and free binary downloads. They still have the keys, of course, and unlike back in StarCraft's day I can't memorize their newer ones, but it's still major progress.
As for copy protection, you're talking to the wrong people. Copy protection costs the developers - both in money for the software and public perception of the game. It wouldn't be there if it wasn't economically beneficial to include. Want to get rid of copy protection (which has been in use since the days of floppy discs)? Get the gamer community to STOP PIRATING. Once copy protection is no longer economically beneficial, it will vanish on its own. Developers are NOT *trying* to annoy their customers, merely to make a profit.
To rephrase that, anti-copy is not the disease, it is the symptom. Like a fever, it is the unpleasant effect of a battle against a much deeper problem. (Sorry for a biological rather than automotive analogy.)
Bah... nothing says they need to have a fixed world with fixed missions and specific encounters/bosses. There are already MMOs that avoid that issue, and there are a couple tricks to it.
First, do NOT use persistent encounters. Have them be random, require people to search (not just stumble upon, except for the lowest-difficulty garden-variety NPCs), and don't require players to find specific encounters for missions. Feel free to drop great stuff in these hidden encounters, but don't make it required gear. Make it sellable/tradable too.
Second, don't force players to run missions at all. To encourage them to do so, make it so the missions offer an easy way to find serious NPC fights, possibly with effects outside only your character. Offer them some stuff that can't be produced any other way (though allow players to buy/sell such stuff amongst themselves) but nothing that is really important for any particular (style of) character.
Third, make the world REALLY FREAKING BIG, and randomly generate content. Since it's not persistent, no particular area becomes in such high demand that gameplay becomes simply a matter of waiting for the encounter to re-spawn. Normally, the reason to avoid random content is that you can't easily have much detail, but with really good random content generation, that's not such an issue (and balance isn't much of a problem either, agains because it's not persistent). This both preserves "where no man has gone before" (since it's so big) and avoids "que[ue] for the boss".
Forth, give players stuff to strive for OTHER than just creating an awesome character ("Galaxy-class starship"). Ideally, let them impact the game world itself, but lacking that at least let them have a real impact on other players. Make the galaxy big enough that nobody NEEDS to go through your space, and all of a sudden it's OK for players to control their own part of the world, officially or not.
Fifth, regarding combat, don't make it just big slugfests. Among other things, make it so an inerperienced player still has a place in a fight between major parties. A really good player should still be able to kill them with ease in 1v1, maybe even 1v2, but a handful of newbies - say somewhere between 5 and 10 - should be able to kill any single opponent, or at least cripple them.
There's more, but those are the main points. Basically, don't make the missions (or quests) the central point of the game, and don't make the game world small enough that it's practical to visit every part of it.
Ah, but that's not ALWAYS true - EVE Online has literally no limits on character capability - given enough time and money to buy skillbooks, you can get every single skill in the game to the maximum level, fly any ship, use any equipment... As for finite content, the NPC fights are mostly randomly generated, but they aren't even the central aspect of the game. That is the PvP and empire-building, and those are effectively unlimited. Sure, there's only so much space that can be claimed by players, but you can always take somebody ELSE's space, and they perioodically open up new systems (several free expansions are released each year).
Of course, apparently some people don't like a game where PvP is that major an aspect - especailly since death can, in extreme cases, put you back many months, even over a year, of work (most people fly ships that aren't NEARLY that expensive, but it can still get costly). Fortunately, I'm not one of those people - which means EVE is a constantly evolving world for me, because NPC's are just things that let me trade some ammo for some money any time my balance gets a bit low.
There are probably at least a few others. Not to say it isn't awesome, but please... a LITTLE reasearch before making such wild claims? I realize that's a lot to ask of many people here...
So... you're saying A) that you've not bought a physical media computer game in the last, oh, 10 years (at least some floppy disc games had copy protect, for that matter), and B) just because you claim to be trustworthy, the game developers should trust everybody?
No offense, but it is NOT going to happen. The introduction of anti-copy was a REACTION to the rampant piracy that was - and in many cases, still is - going on (at colleges, between friends, and through the anonymity of the Internet). If you want a world where games come without copy protection, etc. then you need to first convince the gamer community to stop piracy. Only then can you reasonably expect devs to stop putting in ant-copy. Believe me, it's not what we (in the general dev community sense) want to be doing; it costs money and lowers people's impressions of software. It is, however, also economically necessary to have at least minimal anti-copy in place.
In other words, fix the problem (the piracy) before you complain about the symptoms (the anti-copy). They will vanish on their own once they are no longer economically beneficial.
That said, I like your attitude. It's unrealistic in the present software world, but - with the possible exceptions of the Glider complaint (I don't like how they did it either, but programs like that really can screw up a game world) and some EULA cases (i.e. don't screw up the online experience for others by cheating) - I think the world you're asking for would generally be a better place.
You talk about "some hard radiation" and imply that it will do nothing. However, a nuke releases a TON of energy, much of it in the form of heat (or radiation that will heat whatever it hits). You won't catch anything on fire without oxygen, but wouldn't it still vaporize some of the asteroid's surface? The expanding gas from the vaporized rock should push the asteroid at least a bit. I'm not sure how much, but just because there's no air doesn't mean there won't be at least some blast effect.
Actually... this is a little pedantic, but there's nothing about censorship that makes it exclusively a government action. Censorship is any official act of deleting or otherwise removing text, pictures, or basically any kind of information. If Slashdot were, in fact, deleting posts about pandas, it would still be censorship. Completely legal, of course, but nonetheless censorship.
Out of curiosity, what kind of hardware are you unable to get drivers for? If it's got XP drivers, those will almost certainly work (unless it's a video card, in which case they'll work but not with Aero). If it is a video card, and for a laptop, try the site laptopvideo2go; they modify nVidia's desktop drivers (which are quite good) to work on laptops (where the official drivers are quite crap). It's the only driver issue I've had with Vista in over two years of use, and I've been using LaptopVideo2Go's drivers for months now with no problems.
Gravity, for one. Venusian gravity is close to Earth's (one reason it has a vaguely comparable atmosphere), and gravity is important for bone health, etc. It may be possible to live safely for extended periods on Mars, but on the space station, even with regular exercise, skeletal atrophy is a serious problem over even a few months.
The newer Windows Server versions do something very much like this. Even if the didn't, all versions of NT since 2004 have a firewall enabled by default - but yeah, XP SP1 and down were pretty bad.
I realize you're being humorous, but for those here who don't - Storm spreads through trojans. Every form of installer for it that I've discovered requires at least some user interaction, usually as Administrator (no, I don't even run XP as admin - though I realize that's not the default).
Last I checked, XP's firewall wasn't capable of outbound filtering. Vista's is, but the default rule (easily changeable, but default nonetheless) is to allow all outgoing traffic. Since malicious software generally must reach the system before it can phone home, this is probably not a problem when considering situations with no user interaction.
#1 was particularly amusing to me - this is one of the main things that's great about Windows Defender, which is installed on all editions of Vista. It has a nice UI, and if you check Vista's help for managing startup items, it directs you there (with a direct link to the relevant tool view).
Slashdot Mirror
IE8 (or as an add-on to IE7, much like the extensions you mention) includes Developer Tools (look under Tools in the command bar, or press F12). It has a JavaScript debugger, tools for examining the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript source, a profiler, validation tools, and handy stuff like drawing outlines around individual elements or elements of a given class.
While not providing as much functionality as all the extensions you mention rolled together, it is nonetheless quite nice and excellent for examining pages or dealing with client-side scripts. The fact that it's built in is a nice bonus.
Actually, that was one of the things that drove me back to IE - it really is better at keeping each tab alive without making the current tab unusable. I'm not sure if it does some funky stuff with thread priorities or whatnot, but I can (and have) run down the Slashdot main page, middle-clickign every link that looks vaguely interesting, and ended up with 14 tabs loading in the background (and with D2, IE7 loads Slashdot articles quite slowly - though it's fast with IE8 beta 2). The main tab remains responsive, and I can watch as up to two tabs at a time (on my dual-core machine) finish loading along the tab bar. If I switch to a not-yet-loaded tab, it will come up as quickly as if I had clicked the link on the main page and opened it in the same tab.
First, does the "always clear my private data" feature allow it to, for example, NOT clear my Slashdot cookie? IE8's InPrivate clears THAT SESSION'S data, not just every temporary file the browser has.
Second, does it allow you to open multiple browser windows, one that is private and will be erased, and another that is normal? I typically have a browser session open for days if not weeks, and given that Firefox doesn't actually *end* until the very last Firefox window is closed, I rather doubt you'd be able to "privatize" one session without being forced to close the other as well.
As for the session restore, IE8 reloads automatically and instantly if it crashes (there's a separate process running that detects if the browser process dies), and if there's a specific page in the browser that is making it crash, it will attempt a few times to reload, and on the third try will stop attempting to load the offending tab (with a message explaining the problem).
Yeah, this was my first really impressive thing I saw with IE8, aside from passing Acid2. First, individual tabs can crash without bringing down the whole browser (something Firefox would do REALLY well to copy). Second, if (or, in the case of beta1, WHEN) the browser did entirely crash, it re-loaded instantly with all tabs. If one of the tabs caused it to crash again immediately (which I found one site that would cause this) it would try one more time, and on the third recovery would not load the offending page with a message stating that the page in that tab was causing the browser to crash and has not been reloaded for that reason. Very well implemented, and the whole process doesn't take very long at all.
Forensic data retrieval tools can pull files off your hard drive that you (thouhgt) you deleted months ago, or possibly longer, depsneding on how often a particular block gets overwritten. Of course, it needs physical disk access and expensive equipment, so Joe Average cerainly is NOT going to be getting to it - and that's all this feature is designed to protect against.
It keeps your spouse from knowing you bought a special gift for your anniversary. It keeps your dad from seeing the site a friend told you about at school (actually, Vista's parental controls may be able to prevent InPrivate mode). It keeps your female friend who comes over to visit from seeing the most common site you visit whose URL starts with an 'x'. All in all, it seems a smart and well-thought-up product. They should make it a start menu entry rather than just something you start after opening the browser (heck, if it is a command line switch you could make that the default mode), but it still seems pretty good.
Holy shit... it's actually faster than FF3 for Slashdot on my machine. Good scroll speed, good render time, and the AJAX comment posting system - even that period between when you click "Preview" and when it actually is ready to post - is instantaneous.
Still only gets 21/100 on Acid 3, but that's better than any previous IE version, including the beta 1.
Forensically cleaning storage (without destroying it) is certainly possible, but requires considerably more effort to do right than simply unlinking some temp files from the master file table. Given enough usage, my guess is that the data will become sufficiently overwritten to be unrecoverable, but that could take quite some time.
Note that after overwriting the data even once, I believe it takes physical access to the disk (not just the computer, but the actual disk inside of it) to do any recovery. It also require tools your average spouse/parent/burglar/script kiddie is not going to have.
On the other hand, if you've got something that you want to hide from authorities with serious data retrieval tools, you should be using a fully encrypted volume.
Two points:
1: None of the platforms you mentioned are, as far as I know, running advertising campaigns that they can access "the whole Internet" (or even web) and as such, your point is not relevant to the discussion (which is whether the iPhone ad is valid and the response is appropriate).
2: I run x64 openSuse, and have done so for well over a year (since the release of either 10.2, on 11.0 now). Flash works fine in general. Pandora works fine. YouTube works fine. Dr. Horrible (Hulu player) worked fine.
I haven't tried using Moonlight yet, and I'm aware it's still incomplete. but then, nobody promised me I'd be able to view the Olympics site in Linux either - if they had, they'd quite possibly be in violation of Truth in Advertising regulations.
So, in a serious question, would anybody like to explain why this (InPrivate) is "bullshit"? The concept of storing all browsing history, cookies, and other temp. Internet files in a temporary storage that is lost forever when the browser closes sounds both perfectly reasonable and technologically sound. It's not like the concept of files which are deleted when their last handles are closed is new, and "treat all cookies as session cookies" is pretty easy too. Avoid writing browsing history and such into the standard storage for such things, and you've got a browsing session that, once it ends, leaves no traces recoverable without forensic tools.
From a software development standpoint, this neither sounds difficult nor unreasonable. The user starts IE with a command-line switch (normally via the Start menu). Said switch sets a global flag in the browser. All CreateFile calls that can actually create files (for the POSIX-only types out there, CreateFile is the Win32 equivalent of open(2)) now create the file as temporary only. Similarly, the browsing histroy, auto-complete, and so forth also go into temporary files. When the browser closes, those files are all deleted. It'd take some work - for example, what if two InPrivate sessions were started at the same time? - but does not sound particularly challenging, technologically.
Note that I'm only referring to the private browsing session feature, here - the one that *somebody* felt the need to call bullshit upon. Unless you claim that such a feature cannot, in fact, provide the protections suggested above (which is a valid position, should you choose to take it), you need to explain why the feature itself would not work.
The concept of blocking advertiser tricks which are silently impinging on user privacy is something else, and arguably quite cool - but not relevant to this post.
Stealing (literally) whatever we want, hurting people who get in our way, having sex with anybody we find desirable, and driving as fast as *you* feel safe doing (or faster, if you're an adrenaline junkie) are all human nature too. As are many other despicable things. Civilization is not built on embracing "human nature" nearly as much as it is built on *containing* it for the good of all of us.
If you want to argue that piracy, software or otherwise, benefits the community as a whole, I'll listen. If you want to quote some idealist, then put a downright out-of-touch-with-reality interpretation on it and justify that as "human nature", please go find somewhere else to do.
That's true with a lot of things, but not really with gaming. Games (like other multimedia apps) make a lot more use of lower-level stuff... which is often hardly portable at all. You can make a GTK+ GUI app and run it on any OS, but for games you're in a much trickier place. There's OpenGL, but from what I've heard it's a bit of a pain to use, and what are you going to do for audio? How about controller input other than mouse and keyboard? Even networking code needs some tweaking between OSes.
To put it differently, take a look at DirectX. All of it. Now, compare that to everything you need to do to make a game cross-platform. At that point, I wonder if it really isn't easier to just code to Wine/Crossover [Games/Mac]. You don't get the latest, cutting-edge APIs... but you probably can't get those anyhow if cross-platform is essential.
My main complaint about this is that you're installing executables from people of, at best, questionable morality. At least half the time somebody at school asks me to clean malware off their machine, it got there through a NoCD-type executable they downloaded off DC++.
Valve does seem to "get it" pretty well. Blizzard is moving this way as well, with legit NoCD patches, the ability to store your CD key online behind a username/password, and free binary downloads. They still have the keys, of course, and unlike back in StarCraft's day I can't memorize their newer ones, but it's still major progress.
As for copy protection, you're talking to the wrong people. Copy protection costs the developers - both in money for the software and public perception of the game. It wouldn't be there if it wasn't economically beneficial to include. Want to get rid of copy protection (which has been in use since the days of floppy discs)? Get the gamer community to STOP PIRATING. Once copy protection is no longer economically beneficial, it will vanish on its own. Developers are NOT *trying* to annoy their customers, merely to make a profit.
To rephrase that, anti-copy is not the disease, it is the symptom. Like a fever, it is the unpleasant effect of a battle against a much deeper problem. (Sorry for a biological rather than automotive analogy.)
Bah... nothing says they need to have a fixed world with fixed missions and specific encounters/bosses. There are already MMOs that avoid that issue, and there are a couple tricks to it.
First, do NOT use persistent encounters. Have them be random, require people to search (not just stumble upon, except for the lowest-difficulty garden-variety NPCs), and don't require players to find specific encounters for missions. Feel free to drop great stuff in these hidden encounters, but don't make it required gear. Make it sellable/tradable too.
Second, don't force players to run missions at all. To encourage them to do so, make it so the missions offer an easy way to find serious NPC fights, possibly with effects outside only your character. Offer them some stuff that can't be produced any other way (though allow players to buy/sell such stuff amongst themselves) but nothing that is really important for any particular (style of) character.
Third, make the world REALLY FREAKING BIG, and randomly generate content. Since it's not persistent, no particular area becomes in such high demand that gameplay becomes simply a matter of waiting for the encounter to re-spawn. Normally, the reason to avoid random content is that you can't easily have much detail, but with really good random content generation, that's not such an issue (and balance isn't much of a problem either, agains because it's not persistent). This both preserves "where no man has gone before" (since it's so big) and avoids "que[ue] for the boss".
Forth, give players stuff to strive for OTHER than just creating an awesome character ("Galaxy-class starship"). Ideally, let them impact the game world itself, but lacking that at least let them have a real impact on other players. Make the galaxy big enough that nobody NEEDS to go through your space, and all of a sudden it's OK for players to control their own part of the world, officially or not.
Fifth, regarding combat, don't make it just big slugfests. Among other things, make it so an inerperienced player still has a place in a fight between major parties. A really good player should still be able to kill them with ease in 1v1, maybe even 1v2, but a handful of newbies - say somewhere between 5 and 10 - should be able to kill any single opponent, or at least cripple them.
There's more, but those are the main points. Basically, don't make the missions (or quests) the central point of the game, and don't make the game world small enough that it's practical to visit every part of it.
Ah, but that's not ALWAYS true - EVE Online has literally no limits on character capability - given enough time and money to buy skillbooks, you can get every single skill in the game to the maximum level, fly any ship, use any equipment... As for finite content, the NPC fights are mostly randomly generated, but they aren't even the central aspect of the game. That is the PvP and empire-building, and those are effectively unlimited. Sure, there's only so much space that can be claimed by players, but you can always take somebody ELSE's space, and they perioodically open up new systems (several free expansions are released each year).
Of course, apparently some people don't like a game where PvP is that major an aspect - especailly since death can, in extreme cases, put you back many months, even over a year, of work (most people fly ships that aren't NEARLY that expensive, but it can still get costly). Fortunately, I'm not one of those people - which means EVE is a constantly evolving world for me, because NPC's are just things that let me trade some ammo for some money any time my balance gets a bit low.
Slightly different thread, perhaps, but I just wanted to poin out: this is NOT the first laptop with a Core 2 Extreme CPU.
HP has one (though it's 20.1 inches - a real beast): http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_can_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=notebooks&a1
Dell has one (17"): http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dycwm90&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&kc=category~notebooks
There are probably at least a few others. Not to say it isn't awesome, but please... a LITTLE reasearch before making such wild claims? I realize that's a lot to ask of many people here...
So... you're saying A) that you've not bought a physical media computer game in the last, oh, 10 years (at least some floppy disc games had copy protect, for that matter), and B) just because you claim to be trustworthy, the game developers should trust everybody?
No offense, but it is NOT going to happen. The introduction of anti-copy was a REACTION to the rampant piracy that was - and in many cases, still is - going on (at colleges, between friends, and through the anonymity of the Internet). If you want a world where games come without copy protection, etc. then you need to first convince the gamer community to stop piracy. Only then can you reasonably expect devs to stop putting in ant-copy. Believe me, it's not what we (in the general dev community sense) want to be doing; it costs money and lowers people's impressions of software. It is, however, also economically necessary to have at least minimal anti-copy in place.
In other words, fix the problem (the piracy) before you complain about the symptoms (the anti-copy). They will vanish on their own once they are no longer economically beneficial.
That said, I like your attitude. It's unrealistic in the present software world, but - with the possible exceptions of the Glider complaint (I don't like how they did it either, but programs like that really can screw up a game world) and some EULA cases (i.e. don't screw up the online experience for others by cheating) - I think the world you're asking for would generally be a better place.
You talk about "some hard radiation" and imply that it will do nothing. However, a nuke releases a TON of energy, much of it in the form of heat (or radiation that will heat whatever it hits). You won't catch anything on fire without oxygen, but wouldn't it still vaporize some of the asteroid's surface? The expanding gas from the vaporized rock should push the asteroid at least a bit. I'm not sure how much, but just because there's no air doesn't mean there won't be at least some blast effect.
Actually... this is a little pedantic, but there's nothing about censorship that makes it exclusively a government action. Censorship is any official act of deleting or otherwise removing text, pictures, or basically any kind of information. If Slashdot were, in fact, deleting posts about pandas, it would still be censorship. Completely legal, of course, but nonetheless censorship.
Out of curiosity, what kind of hardware are you unable to get drivers for? If it's got XP drivers, those will almost certainly work (unless it's a video card, in which case they'll work but not with Aero). If it is a video card, and for a laptop, try the site laptopvideo2go; they modify nVidia's desktop drivers (which are quite good) to work on laptops (where the official drivers are quite crap). It's the only driver issue I've had with Vista in over two years of use, and I've been using LaptopVideo2Go's drivers for months now with no problems.
Gravity, for one. Venusian gravity is close to Earth's (one reason it has a vaguely comparable atmosphere), and gravity is important for bone health, etc. It may be possible to live safely for extended periods on Mars, but on the space station, even with regular exercise, skeletal atrophy is a serious problem over even a few months.
The newer Windows Server versions do something very much like this. Even if the didn't, all versions of NT since 2004 have a firewall enabled by default - but yeah, XP SP1 and down were pretty bad.
More specifically, can you still buy Windows XP RTM (SP0).
No, of course not. SP2 and above have the firewall enabled by default, and many fewer vulnerabilities anyhow.
I realize you're being humorous, but for those here who don't - Storm spreads through trojans. Every form of installer for it that I've discovered requires at least some user interaction, usually as Administrator (no, I don't even run XP as admin - though I realize that's not the default).
Last I checked, XP's firewall wasn't capable of outbound filtering. Vista's is, but the default rule (easily changeable, but default nonetheless) is to allow all outgoing traffic. Since malicious software generally must reach the system before it can phone home, this is probably not a problem when considering situations with no user interaction.
#1 was particularly amusing to me - this is one of the main things that's great about Windows Defender, which is installed on all editions of Vista. It has a nice UI, and if you check Vista's help for managing startup items, it directs you there (with a direct link to the relevant tool view).