Usability does not come from gradients and curved corners.
Graphic design and usability are two different disciplines. Anyone who wants a good introduction to usability could easily do worse than reading Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column. (I hesitate to call it a blog for several reasons, not least because it predates the coining of the term!)
You are right. We should have dual posted speed limits.
California already does -- speed limits are capped at 55 for commercial trucks and anyone towing a trailer, even if the speed limit is otherwise higher.
You can't talk about the information created by a game at all in a money-making context without making yourself legally liable to the league.
NBA tried to claim that in NBA v. STATS. At 1088, 1093, 1094 [come on Google, put in page and paragraph anchors!]:
NBA games do not constitute "original works of authorship" and thus do not fall within the subject matter of copyright protection
A state law claim of misappropriation was dismissed on appeal on the basis that federal copyright law preempts the state law. The 2nd Circuit's decision at 851 quotes Computer Associates v. Altai at 717 (this case is a good read for the Slashdot crowd: copyright, trade secret and software):
An action will not be saved from preemption by elements such as awareness or intent, which alter `the action's scope but not its nature'.... Following this `extra element' test, we have held that unfair competition and misappropriation claims grounded solely in the copying of a plaintiff's protected expression are preempted by section 301.
That said, the above case law may be merely academic if the sports leagues are just trying to run you out of business with legal fees and hassles.
#include <std/disclaimer.h>
#include <std/ianal.h>
NFL's weapon in this context is trademark, not copyright. You can talk about the score when Oakland played Pittsburgh all day long, but if you mention the teams' actual names in a commercial context you'll likely need a license. That's also why so many ads for sports bars talk about watching the "big game" or "football championship". NFL's trademark enforcement is so over-the-top I've actually heard radio ads where they lampooned it (and probably tempted fate) by advertising a "Su[BLEEP]wl party".
"Longhorn" was a truly epic vision, apparently not within the capability of Microsoft's organization to deliver within any reasonable time frame. That may have made Vista as delivered
I have to give them proper respect for what they did manage to do: stuff in the NT 6 kernel, a compositing window manager, concurrent user support in Client-Side Caching (which I heard was a nightmare to add)
That doesn't mean it makes any sense from a technical or scientific point of view. The only reason that is the law is because special interests have decided to go with delusional impossible ideas to protect their profit engine.
From a technical point of view, licensing information would be metadata, and therefore not part of the content proper. The OP's headache stems from the fact that in current practice this metadata is not typically recorded or transmitted with the file.
In my opinion, an ideal DRM scheme would be one that, in terms of design decisions, always favors the machine owner over the rightsholder and never uses technical means to attempt to prevent — or to notify the rightsholder, their agents or law enforcement agents of — any action actually or potentially infringing upon others' exclusive rights. Instead, it simply and unobtrusively records and stores (out-of-band, without adding identifying information to the file bits) provenance and rights information for files, and allows the user to make their own decisions. Whether to block, prompt about or permit actually or potentially infringing actions would be a policy set by the machine's owner.
For me, college coursework -- especially computer science coursework -- was mostly a breeze, an overview and introduction to the material. What made it worthwhile was the time spent digging deeper than the classes -- independent study in the truest sense of the word. College creates the environment where that kind of self-directed, self-motivated learning is possible. The Internet facilitates the flowering of a new Invisible College beyond the conventional campus.
Anti-intellectual sentiment is so prevalent in the zeitgeist of much of America, the Middle East and central Asia, it's no surprise some geeks are picking it up. Anti-college sentiment specifically, on the other hand, likely arises from the large number of graduates -- even those with master-level degrees -- that are unable to "hit the ground running" in a work environment, or even require refresher courses on basic algorithms and data structures such as breadth-first search with associated queues.
I really do wish they'd get around to implementing the Retargetable bit on assembly references though. In my opinion, it's the best way to support end-user replacement of LGPL components -- all dependencies of a signed assembly have to be signed as well, but if a dependency is Retargetable it permits any signature, not just the original one -- they can swap in their own component without a problem and you still don't have to give them your signing key.
It's also the best way to indicate that code is agnostic to the underlying CLR implementation -- make the mscorlib, System, etc. references Retargetable and it will bind to alternate implementations that don't use the same BCL signing keys, such as Compact Framework.
No, the worst of it is vertical-market software vendors that start from the assumption that competent IT help will not be available and therefore build software that won't run without write privileges to the entire drive (including the root of the system drive, because it poos temp files there), includes a kernel-mode printer driver that breaks on anything newer than XP just to render TIFFs for faxing, requires a separate login dialog in spite of also requiring a domain, and in spite of being MSI-based, lacks any working silent-install capabilities so the only way to automate rolling it out is sending mouse events to the setup, and count on the utter lack of data portability to keep you locked in to their miserable product.
Sorry, just had to vent a little.
1. How does he know there's no bug in his copy protection code that does not inadvertently trigger for legitimate users under ANY circumstance
According to the article, the error message includes the user's Steam account number, which can be used to distinguish any cases in which the user actually paid for a license but is still getting rejected by the copy-protection check.
2. How does he know the people "pirating" haven't paid for a legit copy and decided to get around all the BS restrictions by using a crack anyway.
If all the serial numbers have been metaphorically filed off, then the Steam account number referenced is probably nonexistent anyway, so who are they really accusing of piracy? If someone's using a crack to work around restrictions, then this is just one more restriction to work around.
Different hashes are for different purposes.
No argument there.
The CRC class of hash functions actually makes certain statistical guarantees for the longest run of possible errant bytes in source data and are extremely faster, making them far more suitable for file integrity checks.
CRC is great for packet-sized input, but not so great over larger chunks of data; also, the way its design targets burst errors means that widely separated point errors aren't as effectively caught. There's a reason Ethernet jumbo frames haven't gone much over 9000 bytes -- Ethernet's CRC-32 is much less effective at message sizes over 12000 bytes or so. Cryptographically strong hashes tend to be less sensitive to input length.
A computer scientist is someone who fixes things that aren't broken.
