Restart, Restore, or Continue Creating Democracy?

The Importance of writes "LawMeme's James Grimmelmann, whose work has previously been noted on Slashdot, has written a new piece about virtual life and death in MMORPGs, and what that means for online democracy. Any serious discussion of democracy online that features comments on "The Secret of Monkey Island" has got to be good."

Comments

Gupta is a troll

[ChaosDiscord]

Quoth Gupta's signature (just in case he changes it):

Samir Gupta, Ph.D New Technology Research Department Nintendo Co, Ltd. Kyoto, Japan

Gupta is an old troll. He's pretty good at generating a combination of techno-babble and plausible facts, but he sure as hell isn't really involved in Nintendo research.

Mind you, sometimes he's actually posts interesting ideas, but he claims that his ideas represent current Nintendo research. If any of his claims do match Nintendo actions, it's only by accident or external research by the author; it's not based on inside information.

I suspect Gupta gets a kick out of knowing that he is misleading people, "Look, they all believe I work at Nintendo and am privy to secrets, aren't I clever."

Apparently Gupta is getting lazy, this post is just a copy of his post from last month. (At the very least, this duplication should earn him a "Redundant") And that post is an almost word-for-word retrend of one of his posts from July.

Some classic Gupta for comparison. Some of his technobabble can be hard to sort through if you're not familiar with the field.

• Clustering GameCubes - No, GameCubes are not a terribly good system for doing clustering with, anyone doing so is doing it on a lark, not as real work.
• Some strange ideas on reducing crashes - One of the goals of an operating system is to reduce the impact of a crash or malicious code, running everything at the highest level doesn't really gain you stability. Catching a NULL pointer dereference is handy, but recovering from it is nearly impossible; anything that caused a null pointer dereference this frame is likely going to cause it again next frame.
• GameCubes have Zen Buddhist design - Ummmm, right. There is nothing like a bright purple box to "fitting into the big picture without standing out."
• Nintendo is excited about Peer-To-Peer game distribution, odd that the only real reference is on Slashdot.