What’s the landmass of World of Warcraft?

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Cory Doctorow:
Through a very clever improvised measurement technique, Tobold has come up with an estimate for the size of all the land in the virtual world Azeroth, where World of Warcraft is played. He estimated that pre-Burning Crusade expansion, Azeroth clocked in at 200km square.

To measure a square mile, you first need to define what a mile is. As "a mile" doesn't even have the same length on different places on our earth, that isn't trivial. The basic definition of a mile is coming from Roman times, defining a mile a 1000 double steps of a marching legion. The soldiers had to walk through all of Europe anyway, so you just needed to count their steps and had the place all measured up with few extra effort. Clever guys, these Romans. But on Azeroth "steps" aren't that easy to count, and the length of legs between the different races varies widely. But interestingly all races move at the same running speed, so it makes sense to define the mile by the time it takes to run it. On earth, a marathon runner has a running speed of about 12 miles per hour. As everybody on Azeroth is a hero, lets just define the Azerothian running speed as 12 mph as well. This effectively defines an Azerothian mile as "the distance you can run in 5 minutes", without using any speed enhancing items of course.

Link

(via Waxy)

(Via Boing Boing.)

Wikipedia battle over iPhone trademark

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Filed under:

There's something deeply fascinating about article debates at Wikipedia; reading the intricate threads is like eavesdropping on a librarian's convention where the punch has been spiked with PCP. The tumult du jour is the involved discussion on the appropriate naming and disposition of the iPhone article.

It seems that the rational question of "What do we put at the wikipedia.org/wiki/iPhone page: the Apple product, the Cisco/Linksys product, or a disambiguation of the two products?" has led to fear, thence to anger and naturally to suffering. The commotion and disagreement apparently attracted the attention of some Cisco employees, who attempted to right the perceived injustice and were promptly chastised. The whole affair has resulted in the virtual lockdown of the iPhone page while tempers and keyboards cool off.

If you want a taste of the secret sauce that helps Wikipedia manage as a self-regulating community, check out the conventions on the naming of articles. Highly gripping; couldn't put it down.

Thanks Adam!

Read

(Via TUAW.)

Bush: I’m Sending More Troops To Iraq No Matter What Congress Does

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This week, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) introduced a resolution requiring President Bush to gain new congressional authorization before escalating the War in Iraq.


President Bush, however, says that he is going to send more troops to Iraq no matter what Congress does. Watch an excerpt from his 60 Minutes interview tonight:



Screenshot


Legal scholars on the right and left agree that Congress has the legal power to prevent an escalation or end the war completely.


Transcript:


Q: If you have the authority to put the troops in there no matter what the Congress wants to do.


BUSH: I think I’ve got, in this situation I do, yeah. I fully understand they could try to stop me from doing it. But I’ve made my decision. And we’re going forward.

(Via Think Progress.)

Vista “suicide note” researcher interview on Security Now

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Cory Doctorow:
The excellent Security Now podcast just aired an interview with Peter Guttman, the security researcher who wrote the celebrated "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" (this is the paper whose "executive executive summary" read simply, "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history").

Guttman has really dug into the crazy extremes that Vista -- the next version of Windows -- goes to in order to restrict how you use high-definition video. The operating system has been essentially rendered useless by a set of deliberately introduced malfunctions. For example, the if your computer detects erroneous data in its registers, or voltage fluctuations (both of which are typical of PCs whose parts have been manufactured by dozens of companies), it will restart major subsystems, hanging up while it flushes all your data -- just in case those errors were part of a hack-attack on the system.

Vista is a disaster. Microsoft is so desperate to get the entertainment industry locked into its platform that they'll destroy themselves to get there. This is an operating system that, when idle, will have to check itself every 30 microseconds to make sure nothing is still happening, and no hackers are attacking it. It acts like an unmedicated paranoid. If Vista catches on, hundreds of millions of computers will be burning heptillions of cycles and tons of coal just making sure that no one is putting a voltmeter on the traces on its motherboard.

And those are its good points.


And what it means is that so many aspects of our PCs, which have been fully documented, been public domain, been anyone could develop a display card, for example, that’s no longer the case. If you’re going to have any foot in this next-generation game, you have to sign up and apparently pay hefty license fees just to participate. And if you don’t get certificates, which are subject to spontaneous revocation, if you then subsequently misbehave, or in fact I read one of the AACS organization documents said that you could be revoked if you failed to pay your annual dues.

Link

See also:

Great information-security weekly podcast

Windows Vista: Suicide notes, nerdcore rap MP3

(Via Boing Boing.)