Hideo Kojima (of Metal Gear Solid fame) had a similar idea early in his career and apparently has been trying to implement it ever since. His idea was for a game that would erase itself if the player died in-game, forcing him or her to go buy a new copy if they wanted to try to play it again. This was a purely artistic idea, though, meant to force the player to empathize with their character's simulated mortality, and as far as I can tell wasn't motivated by greed. Luckily, all his colleagues realized how crazy it was and never let him get it off the ground.

Doing this to kill the secondhand market is just despicable, though. I hope this turns into a scandal for Capcom. We can all point out how DRM harms legitimate customers and secondhand business until we're blue in the face, but this is going to do it in such an obvious way (that's doesn't even have the pretense of anti-piracy!) that it should get people's attention.

I interpret "evolutionary scientist" as a scientist specializing in evolutionary biology.

Obligatory XKCD counterpoint! http://xkcd.com/763/

I love Civilization. I've been a big fan of the series since I played Civ II at the age of 13 or so. Just the other day I enjoyed getting reacquainted with Alpha Centauri. But when I found out last year how Civilization V was being released—with every little civ and scenario nickel-and-dimed out as DLC, with a pitifully small selection of starting content for your fifty bucks and it being painfully obvious that they were withholding finished content to sell it to you later—I said "no thanks". Some day, when they're done shilling their so-called "expansion content" and the complete, ne-plus-ultra pack is available on Steam for $20 or $30, maybe—maybe—I'll buy it and find out if there was a good game under all the shameless greed.

So I hope it means something when I say that StarCraft 2 doesn't seem to be done that way at all. It plays like a finished game, with no game mechanics visibly held back to make the expansions more appealing. Blizzard hasn't tried to squeeze any more money out of it with DLC; on the contrary, they've pushed out free bonus maps as they did for their other RTSs. The campaign's story is the right length, and feels like a complete, self-contained episode in a series. If (as they plan) each expansion gives us another equally-sized chunk of story and some new game mechanics as a bonus, I think that's a fair product to sell and I'll happily buy them. And in case anyone from 2K Games is listening, take note: this is why I happily bought the expansions to Civilization III and IV also.

And just so you don't think I'm a fanboy, I don't think everything is perfect with SC2. The all-online model is obnoxious, forcing you to download custom maps through an "app store" is hideously stupid, and the DRM and "you get only one username and profile" thing still make me want to punch someone in the head. (Maybe I want another name! Maybe I think it would be fun to start over earning achievements on a blank slate! Did you think about that when you were trying to make the next Steam or Facebook or whatever? *pant* *heave*)

I've often read that remembering something is a constructive process. I tend to think of it like checking out a revision from source control software. All it has are a bunch of diffs and pointers, and it executes a process on them to construct a snapshot of what the code looked like at some particular time. From that perspective, the snapshot is a new piece of output, even though it's cached information from the user's perspective. Human memory is said to work the same way: it's reassembled, not retrieved.

So, if a person has eidetic memory, then one would expect them to have a better than average "ability to extract what's meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters". On the other hand, since a defining trait of eidetic memory (as the term is often used) is being able to recall any detail and not just "what's meaningful", it must also entail exceptional ability to store and recall mass amounts of raw data (the diffs and pointers in my analogy). But nonetheless, I'd expect them to be exceptionally strong at filtering and reconstruction as well if they're able to form that data into coherent memories and verbalize them.

Then I suppose the hyperlearning hypothesis is saying that the reconstruction process breaks down because the data is too abundant and disorganized. Maybe I can extend the file storage analogy a little further: a hard disk that's so full that you can't defrag it? Or one where deleted files stay behind and come up instead of whatever you tried to overwrite on those disk sectors? Corrupt file system table?

IANAN/P (I am not a neurologist/psychologist). This is all my layman's, Wikipedia-level understanding and would welcome elaborations or corrections.

Nope, citation actually has next to nothing to do with it, at least under U.S. law. This is a critical difference between copyright infringement (a legal matter) and plagiarism (an ethical convention held among academics and journalists), and is commonly misunderstood.

Not to mention that mysterious gaps in your collection will probably appear the minute Amazon gets squeamish about sexual morality or discovers they screwed up the licensing.

And they should have eaten the liability for selling something they shouldn't have. They had no right to force their customers to share the burden of their error by screwing with something that was theirs, not even if they provided refunds.

The analogy is inapplicable. The point is they weren't selling a physical copy, they were selling a digital copy, and they dishonestly reneged on the transaction.

False. If I pay to download an MP3 or PDF over FTP, that file is mine and the seller is never going to be able to delete it (at least not without engaging in some black-hat stuff). Paying for ephemeral permission to access something within a walled garden is totally different.

I've been interested in this approach to public surveillance for some time now. I consider myself a strong privacy advocate and I absolutely don't condone any encroachments of privacy in the home or personal communication, but I also try to be realistic about expectations of privacy in public places.

An analogy: if you're relying on a crappy cryptographic protocol for security, that's often worse than no security at all, since it gives you the illusion of safety and leads you to put sensitive data places where it can be cracked. When I hear people decrying government-operated surveillance cameras on public streets, I sympathize and often agree with them, but I also wonder if they have the same sort of illusion of privacy when they're on the sidewalk, camera or no. The government isn't collecting any information with that camera that wouldn't also be accessible to a crank with a window to look out of. Granted, the government has a lot of power to collate and abuse that information, but even that observation seems to assume the absence of a sufficiently dedicated network of private cranks with access to a sufficiently large number of windows. These days, that might be a poor assumption.

So maybe it would be a good thing if we did have surveillance cameras in public places so long as they were streamed to the Internet where anyone could watch. I wouldn't say I'm especially comfortable or happy with the idea, but it might be the net best choice. Some sort of crowdsourcing, whatever problems it might invite, would at least give the cameras some chance of being used to catch actual criminals, which statistically the government is not succeeding at. And it would give us a more realistic understanding of modern privacy and encourage the voting public to have a clearer discussion about where the cameras don't go. It would suck that $person can watch you walk into $embarrassingplace from their desk, but they can already do that if they've got a gossipy friend with a smartphone who's in the right place at the right time.

Agreed. I'm grateful for all the tools that have been published under the GNU name, but it's PR poison. Let me count the ways:

1. People who read it for the first time will pronounce it "new".
2. Other people who talk to them will look for "New Free Call".
3. Geeks who talk to them will give them the "it's pronounced guh-noo" speech, which sounds dumb.
4. People will inevitably want to know what the acronym stands for. When they find out, it will sound like Dadaist word salad and they will wonder why it is so damned important that this phone service is Not Unix. And that's only if they understand the...
5. ...recusive acronym, which will come off as smug or confusing more often than it does as clever.

I get that the extent of math necessary in computer science is an open question and I won't pretend to have an answer to it, but challenging the presence of math, and the academic approach in general, in a university setting bothers me. Of course computer science ought to be taught as an academic discipline in an academic setting. Who cares if students will use it in their careers? The whole point of a university is to study academic disciplines—maybe you intend to apply them and maybe you don't, but either way they are considered worthy of pursuit for their own sake. And that goes not just for computer science (assuming that's your major) but for math, science, and humanities as well.

If you just want to get a job as a programmer without learning all that theoretical stuff, skip the university altogether and just buy a book, or go study at a technical college. Now, you might have a really hard time getting hired without that bachelor's degree, and that does indeed suck, but that's the fault of the labor economy—it's not fair to ask universities to change their philosophy to accommodate corporate culture.

But Sony did sell us a PS3 with advertised features of both (1) access to PSN and (2) the ability to install other OSes and, on those OSes, run whatever software we want. They then forced us to choose at most one of those after they had already collected their money. Their EULA witchcraft will be tested in court to see if they had a legal right to do this, but nothing can make it fair.

Perhaps a more noble rationale than "OMG teh p1rates!", but it still doesn't excuse sabotaging bought-and-paid-for functionality. If they needed to lock down the console in order to keep their gaming network fun, they should have thought about that, and disclosed it, before they sold it to me. What you're talking about is a technical solution to a social problem, and those work badly enough when they aren't immoral.

I agree that the videos themselves are rather boring to watch, except in some instances when they're paired with fun music or interesting commentary, and that people need to make it clear that they're tool-assisted. (As long as I'm griping, I also hate the totally unnecessary neologism "speedrun" when the phrase "speed run" would have sufficed, and even that is annoyingly redundant. [End semantics Nazi rant.])

But I think it's weird to suggest that they're somehow illegitimate, just because they run on different rules of a fan community's invention. It's irrelevant to observe that it's like cheating at the game, since when you're creating a TAS, you're not playing the game, you're creating a TAS. They're two different activities, so of course the rules are different. Complaining about a TAS in comparison to a human-performed speedrun^Wspeed run is like saying it's stupid for an engineer to sit around all day designing a race car because you'd rather watch a real person doing a 100-meter dash.

Let's look at your golf example. Imagine someone practiced the same golf shot thousands of times, until they could unambiguously describe, down to the slightest twitch of muscle fiber, how the most perfect possible swing would be executed by the human body. Don't you think that would be a technically impressive feat, if not entertaining in the same way as a sport, even if no human being could actually execute those instructions? I would think on Slashdot that kind of high-precision, insanely specialized, and ultimately purposeless problem-solving would get a little more geeky respect. (And incidentally, I've never done or even wanted to do a TAS in my life. It sounds infuriatingly tedious. But as I explained, I geekily respect the activity.)

I'm not sure how much that relates your intended point, so I'll close by reiterating that, yes, despite the above, the videos are indeed pretty damned boring to watch. But at least this sort of thing can be pretty funny. :)

Flash memory can't replace RAM and hard drives because it will die after a limited number of read/writes. Semantically nitpicking, that's true of RAM and hard drives too, but the number is prohibitively small with flash memory.

This isn't specific to smartphones, but my least favorite thing about autocorrect is how it's obliterated everyone's ability to put a proper apostophe at the beginning of a word. When an apostrophe shows omitted letters at the beginning of a word, as in 'cause (short for because) or a year shortened to two digits, it's supposed to be a regular apostrophe that (if it isn't just vertically straight, like the ASCII character) looks like a closing single quotation mark. You know, ’. But because Microsoft Word—and, probably because of Microsoft's example, every other damned word processor, including Open/LibreOffice—automatically renders any stroke of the apostrophe key at the beginning of a word as an opening single quotation mark (‘), that's how everything ends up typed, even when the character isn't supposed to be a quotation mark at all.

I admit that there's no elegant way for software to orient those characters correctly every time without bothering the user, but at least professional typographers should know better, and I keep seeing cases where they don't! People must already be assuming that the mark is supposed to get turned around whenever it's at the front of a word, whether it's supposed to be a quotation mark or an apostrophe, because that's how my computer does it and, hey, it can't be wrong. I fear that the correct usage is either going to get hopelessly obscured or (shudder) superseded by some "widely accepted usage" thing.