This masochistic mentality about how challenging video games should be is new to me. As has been mentioned, there have been cheats as long as there have been difficult games. Who really beat Contra without the code? And considering how many weeks of allowance were sunk into those things, is it really so horrible for a kid to want to see all the levels? All Nintendo is doing is saving kids the trouble of buying Game Genies and typing in the damn codes.
I remember being young (very young, I was born in 1981) and playing Dungeon Master on my dad's Atari ST 1040...according to my parents, I learned how to read so I could play play Planetfall and Hitchhiker's Guide!
The one gripe I have with this article is that it neglects the now mostly-extinct genre of interactive fiction. Sierra and Lucasarts both expanded on the Infocom format and made games that I think were as much role-playing games as all the hack-and-slash dungeon games. Both were only able to capture certain aspects of table-top RPG's, and I liked both but always enjoyed the adventure games more. You don't see too many RPG's today that don't rely and tons of mindless combat to fill up space, and these were long, involved games which had few or no combat sequences for the most part. Most early RPG's were pretty light on the RP....
...but as a programmer I have difficulty believing that the images are "accidently" appearing. Bugs can be weird, but that really seems like it would take some Intent to produce. But then again I have a lot more experience with database programming than with graphics, so maybe someone else disagrees?
But like you said, it seems silly to deny a little subliminal advertising when the whole casino is a giant and explicit mind-fuck.
I went to a conference years at which the head archaeologist of the Mashantucket Pequots in Connecticut spoke. He claimed that recent, casino-funded digs in the area had uncovered skulls which seemed to be much older than the 'land bridge' theory would allow for (about 30,000 years ago). The formation of the skull was also much closer to skulls found in France than anything being found locally. He didn't discount the possibility of people cross the Bering Strait, but suggested that more than one waves of migration had probably populated the Americas.
I was aware of the amnesty and speaking semi-facetiously, but that's interesting that Canadian law determines the importance of the offense. Aren't drug laws somewhat different in Canada? My understanding is that marijuana possession is much less strictly regulated, so it could be possible that a felony possession charge in America might only warrant a citation in Canada.
That argument presumes that the conviction was justified. There is no accounting for bad laws (don't even try to tell me there's no such thing) or for convictions for things which are illegal in American but not in Canada! There are people, senior citizens now, who are still alive and lived in a time when black people could be arrested for going the wrong place. Sodomy laws. Protest arrests.
There is also the fact that certain classes of people; minorities and the poor to be specific, are statistically much more likely to receive criminal convictions for their first drug case than for wealthy whites charged with the same crime. So there is a large group of more "respectable" people who were similarly irresponsible but got the charges wiped off their record and have more rights for no valid reason. An irrational bias clearly colors the enforcement of the law. I don't think its so simple as to say anyone with a record gets what they deserve.
So if you were convicted for dodging the Vietnam draft by going to Canada, which the Canadian government allowed, would you be banned from returning now?
I've seen a few posts sort of touching on this, but no one exactly spelled it out: I think the music industry is trying to have its cake and eat it too. They aggressively promote music, stick it in places where it can be heard whether you pay for it or not (hell, whether you want to hear it or not - I have top 40 songs I would never listen to willingly stuck in my head from people playing the radio at work).
I am a musician, and I believe its impossible not to create derivative works. Everything is based on someone else's work...it's more obvious in hip-hop because there's sampling involved, but it's arguable that (for example) Led Zeppelin's appropriation of blues music is far more blatant of a theft, in every way except that they don't use the actual recordings. I use Led Zeppelin as an example because I heard a DJ spin their records besides specific recordings which they "borrowed" from heavily, but I've played in plenty of bands and I think this feature of the creative process is pretty universal.
So I see the promotional wing of the music industry very aggressively trying to cram this music down our throats and get it stuck in our heads, and then their litigators are punishing us when we create something based off of all the pop culture they jammed into us. Hip-hop is an easy target primarily because it uses sampling instead of instruments to rip off other artists (though ironically what a DJ does with a sample is almost always more creative then what a rock band does with their influences), and I think also for all the other stuff it evokes for suburban Americans; scary negroes with guns.
At one point it was completely legal in America to enslave other human beings, and it was illegal to assist them in their escape. More recently, it was illegal for blacks to ride the front of the bus. The laws changed, but were the
people who broke them wrong until they did? That's ridiculous.
Now, I agree that this guy isn't as noble, but it seems pretty ridiculous to penalize someone with incarceration and SWAT teams, which are violent punishments, for a non-violent crime. RICO is serious and carries big time. Add to that the fact that the amount of damage done is debatable, minimal, and probably offset by the free publicity he generates for the artists.
What seems to me to be overwhelmingly right in this case would be to ignore the law. The way people's legs get chopped off from running from their master, or mix tape producers end up in federal prison for years, is not just a small group of powerful men dictating laws and punishments. Every single person who knows something is wrong and goes along with it because it's "just how things are" or its the law lets it happen. Things Don't change if you go along with them. I certainly hope that if this keeps going that law enforcement will be human enough to ignore the laws as often as they can.
I was incarcerated in my late teens and was given an opportunity to work as a teacher/technician inside after attending school for a while. Being a prison school, we were obviously way, way down the list of budgeting priorities for the state. We had a 30+ client network with every sort of OS running; Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, Mac OS 8,9 and 10+, even a few Red Hat machines. My supervisor decided he wanted something better than buggy, half-functioning peer-to-peer and asked me to set up some servers. Partly he wanted to simulate the internet for the students, who had no access to outside networks, and there was also a security issue - a peer-to-peer network didn't provide good security to prevent tampering with publicly-shared files or to provide levels of access to shared data and student records.
So we requested some computers from the state to start making improvements. What we got was a pile of surplus Pentium 1's and 486's that the Judicial Branch and DMV had thrown away. It was a nightmare even getting them to work; half of the BIOS batteries were shot and we had to salvage new batteries from broken old Macs so we could reset the BIOS passwords and boot. Once they were working, we had to deal with the equipment's age. I ended up clearing out an old closet and setting up a whole bunch of sketchy, half-dead servers which were just barely capable of running Red Hat. One did nothing but run Apache, one did nothing but run MySQL, one just ran Samba. It was a nightmare to obtain outside software, so I had to write all the database software and our new online test-taking system in PHP as a server-side system, which was the only way it was guaranteed to work on every client in our crazy hodge-podge network (and there were still problems).
What made things worse was that we had only one UPS and that went on the file server, so I had to write backup scripts that distributed copies of the database and my source code to hidden places on client computers just in case we had a storm and a server's hard drive got toasted (this happened once or twice). An even weirder, and prison-specific problem, was that the administration of the facility was extremely distrustful of the school and our program in specific. They would periodically storm into the school claiming to have received an anonymous tip that we were engaged in some form of illicit activity and confiscate a computer without any regard for how this affected our operations. Seemingly harmless activities - playing games for a few minutes before knocking off, using your computer to type up a letter - were huge offenses inside that could get the culprit thrown into solitary and endanger the program. It was incredibly strange to be in prison and have the privilege of working in that environment, all the while that threat hanging over my head an reminding me of where I really was.
Anyone remember this? It was an obscure 80's spy flick w/ Whoopi Goldberg as a bank employee who is randomly contacted by a British spy via her work terminal. The premise is pretty ridiculous, but its is an accurate depiction of what a chat session on a dumb terminal looked in the 80's, right down to the ugly orange-on-black VT100 graphics. Strangely, large chucks of on-screen time were spent just filming Whoopi typing and reading the screen. They dealt with the viewer's boredom by adding a fantasy voice track representing Whoopi's imaginary version of the spy she was speaking to's voice.
The vast majority of sexual abuse is not perpetrated by strangers or registered sex offenders, but by trusted and familiar adults. The scary internet pedophile is a real phenomenon, but the scale on which he's imagined to exist is pure fantasy. Rape and sexual abuse are frighteningly prevalent, sure, it just isn't being done by any of the people we're so scared of. I was molested by a teacher with no criminal history. I personally know half a dozen woman who were raped by their partners. I've met lots of other male victims of sexual abuse and in every case it was friends/partners or family. I've never met any victims of the internet predators, except through the television...there is a disconnect between reality and media here, yet again.
I think the label of criminal is kind of being tossed around like a kind of boogie man, some clearly designated type of human who is scientifically proven to be more prone (if not certain) to steal and destroy the property of anyone fooled into hiring them. I don't think this has any basis in reality, and background checks serve more as PR and a way to placate the public into a false sense of safety than anything else.
In reality, every workplace I've ever seen, technical or otherwise, was full of "criminals" who had never been caught and for whom background checks would provide zero protection. Humans are quite often greedy and selfish and inclined towards breaking rules when they think they can get away with it. I've had bosses who used background checks to screen employees while they themselves would steal hardware from the office. I wonder how many (much less sensational stories) of IT workers without criminal histories stealing from their employers aren't being reported...
I personally have a criminal record, dating back to my teenage years, and am now in my late twenties. I understand an employer's apprehension when considering me for a job, even after all these years of living a constructive life, but I believe the roots of that apprehension are manufactured by the media. In reality, it is a huge task for an ex-offender to go to school and even develop the qualifications for IT work, and in my personal experience and from volunteering to help employ other ex-offenders, I believe someone who has invested that amount of effort into pursuing that career is far less likely to throw it away by doing something stupid. Most active criminals/addicts can't hold it together enough to get through college and perform the duties expected of an IT worker. They don't invest huge amounts of effort and time playing it straight for years so they can infiltrate companies and ruin everything. This character seems like an aberration to me.
Slashdot Mirror
This masochistic mentality about how challenging video games should be is new to me. As has been mentioned, there have been cheats as long as there have been difficult games. Who really beat Contra without the code? And considering how many weeks of allowance were sunk into those things, is it really so horrible for a kid to want to see all the levels? All Nintendo is doing is saving kids the trouble of buying Game Genies and typing in the damn codes.
I remember being young (very young, I was born in 1981) and playing Dungeon Master on my dad's Atari ST 1040...according to my parents, I learned how to read so I could play play Planetfall and Hitchhiker's Guide!
The one gripe I have with this article is that it neglects the now mostly-extinct genre of interactive fiction. Sierra and Lucasarts both expanded on the Infocom format and made games that I think were as much role-playing games as all the hack-and-slash dungeon games. Both were only able to capture certain aspects of table-top RPG's, and I liked both but always enjoyed the adventure games more. You don't see too many RPG's today that don't rely and tons of mindless combat to fill up space, and these were long, involved games which had few or no combat sequences for the most part. Most early RPG's were pretty light on the RP....
...but as a programmer I have difficulty believing that the images are "accidently" appearing. Bugs can be weird, but that really seems like it would take some Intent to produce. But then again I have a lot more experience with database programming than with graphics, so maybe someone else disagrees?
But like you said, it seems silly to deny a little subliminal advertising when the whole casino is a giant and explicit mind-fuck.
I went to a conference years at which the head archaeologist of the Mashantucket Pequots in Connecticut spoke. He claimed that recent, casino-funded digs in the area had uncovered skulls which seemed to be much older than the 'land bridge' theory would allow for (about 30,000 years ago). The formation of the skull was also much closer to skulls found in France than anything being found locally. He didn't discount the possibility of people cross the Bering Strait, but suggested that more than one waves of migration had probably populated the Americas.
I was aware of the amnesty and speaking semi-facetiously, but that's interesting that Canadian law determines the importance of the offense. Aren't drug laws somewhat different in Canada? My understanding is that marijuana possession is much less strictly regulated, so it could be possible that a felony possession charge in America might only warrant a citation in Canada.
That argument presumes that the conviction was justified. There is no accounting for bad laws (don't even try to tell me there's no such thing) or for convictions for things which are illegal in American but not in Canada! There are people, senior citizens now, who are still alive and lived in a time when black people could be arrested for going the wrong place. Sodomy laws. Protest arrests. There is also the fact that certain classes of people; minorities and the poor to be specific, are statistically much more likely to receive criminal convictions for their first drug case than for wealthy whites charged with the same crime. So there is a large group of more "respectable" people who were similarly irresponsible but got the charges wiped off their record and have more rights for no valid reason. An irrational bias clearly colors the enforcement of the law. I don't think its so simple as to say anyone with a record gets what they deserve.
So if you were convicted for dodging the Vietnam draft by going to Canada, which the Canadian government allowed, would you be banned from returning now?
I've seen a few posts sort of touching on this, but no one exactly spelled it out: I think the music industry is trying to have its cake and eat it too. They aggressively promote music, stick it in places where it can be heard whether you pay for it or not (hell, whether you want to hear it or not - I have top 40 songs I would never listen to willingly stuck in my head from people playing the radio at work).
I am a musician, and I believe its impossible not to create derivative works. Everything is based on someone else's work...it's more obvious in hip-hop because there's sampling involved, but it's arguable that (for example) Led Zeppelin's appropriation of blues music is far more blatant of a theft, in every way except that they don't use the actual recordings. I use Led Zeppelin as an example because I heard a DJ spin their records besides specific recordings which they "borrowed" from heavily, but I've played in plenty of bands and I think this feature of the creative process is pretty universal.
So I see the promotional wing of the music industry very aggressively trying to cram this music down our throats and get it stuck in our heads, and then their litigators are punishing us when we create something based off of all the pop culture they jammed into us. Hip-hop is an easy target primarily because it uses sampling instead of instruments to rip off other artists (though ironically what a DJ does with a sample is almost always more creative then what a rock band does with their influences), and I think also for all the other stuff it evokes for suburban Americans; scary negroes with guns.
At one point it was completely legal in America to enslave other human beings, and it was illegal to assist them in their escape. More recently, it was illegal for blacks to ride the front of the bus. The laws changed, but were the people who broke them wrong until they did? That's ridiculous.
Now, I agree that this guy isn't as noble, but it seems pretty ridiculous to penalize someone with incarceration and SWAT teams, which are violent punishments, for a non-violent crime. RICO is serious and carries big time. Add to that the fact that the amount of damage done is debatable, minimal, and probably offset by the free publicity he generates for the artists.
What seems to me to be overwhelmingly right in this case would be to ignore the law. The way people's legs get chopped off from running from their master, or mix tape producers end up in federal prison for years, is not just a small group of powerful men dictating laws and punishments. Every single person who knows something is wrong and goes along with it because it's "just how things are" or its the law lets it happen. Things Don't change if you go along with them. I certainly hope that if this keeps going that law enforcement will be human enough to ignore the laws as often as they can.
I was incarcerated in my late teens and was given an opportunity to work as a teacher/technician inside after attending school for a while. Being a prison school, we were obviously way, way down the list of budgeting priorities for the state. We had a 30+ client network with every sort of OS running; Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, Mac OS 8,9 and 10+, even a few Red Hat machines. My supervisor decided he wanted something better than buggy, half-functioning peer-to-peer and asked me to set up some servers. Partly he wanted to simulate the internet for the students, who had no access to outside networks, and there was also a security issue - a peer-to-peer network didn't provide good security to prevent tampering with publicly-shared files or to provide levels of access to shared data and student records.
So we requested some computers from the state to start making improvements. What we got was a pile of surplus Pentium 1's and 486's that the Judicial Branch and DMV had thrown away. It was a nightmare even getting them to work; half of the BIOS batteries were shot and we had to salvage new batteries from broken old Macs so we could reset the BIOS passwords and boot. Once they were working, we had to deal with the equipment's age. I ended up clearing out an old closet and setting up a whole bunch of sketchy, half-dead servers which were just barely capable of running Red Hat. One did nothing but run Apache, one did nothing but run MySQL, one just ran Samba. It was a nightmare to obtain outside software, so I had to write all the database software and our new online test-taking system in PHP as a server-side system, which was the only way it was guaranteed to work on every client in our crazy hodge-podge network (and there were still problems).
What made things worse was that we had only one UPS and that went on the file server, so I had to write backup scripts that distributed copies of the database and my source code to hidden places on client computers just in case we had a storm and a server's hard drive got toasted (this happened once or twice). An even weirder, and prison-specific problem, was that the administration of the facility was extremely distrustful of the school and our program in specific. They would periodically storm into the school claiming to have received an anonymous tip that we were engaged in some form of illicit activity and confiscate a computer without any regard for how this affected our operations. Seemingly harmless activities - playing games for a few minutes before knocking off, using your computer to type up a letter - were huge offenses inside that could get the culprit thrown into solitary and endanger the program. It was incredibly strange to be in prison and have the privilege of working in that environment, all the while that threat hanging over my head an reminding me of where I really was.
Anyone remember this? It was an obscure 80's spy flick w/ Whoopi Goldberg as a bank employee who is randomly contacted by a British spy via her work terminal. The premise is pretty ridiculous, but its is an accurate depiction of what a chat session on a dumb terminal looked in the 80's, right down to the ugly orange-on-black VT100 graphics. Strangely, large chucks of on-screen time were spent just filming Whoopi typing and reading the screen. They dealt with the viewer's boredom by adding a fantasy voice track representing Whoopi's imaginary version of the spy she was speaking to's voice.
The vast majority of sexual abuse is not perpetrated by strangers or registered sex offenders, but by trusted and familiar adults. The scary internet pedophile is a real phenomenon, but the scale on which he's imagined to exist is pure fantasy. Rape and sexual abuse are frighteningly prevalent, sure, it just isn't being done by any of the people we're so scared of. I was molested by a teacher with no criminal history. I personally know half a dozen woman who were raped by their partners. I've met lots of other male victims of sexual abuse and in every case it was friends/partners or family. I've never met any victims of the internet predators, except through the television...there is a disconnect between reality and media here, yet again.
I think the label of criminal is kind of being tossed around like a kind of boogie man, some clearly designated type of human who is scientifically proven to be more prone (if not certain) to steal and destroy the property of anyone fooled into hiring them. I don't think this has any basis in reality, and background checks serve more as PR and a way to placate the public into a false sense of safety than anything else. In reality, every workplace I've ever seen, technical or otherwise, was full of "criminals" who had never been caught and for whom background checks would provide zero protection. Humans are quite often greedy and selfish and inclined towards breaking rules when they think they can get away with it. I've had bosses who used background checks to screen employees while they themselves would steal hardware from the office. I wonder how many (much less sensational stories) of IT workers without criminal histories stealing from their employers aren't being reported... I personally have a criminal record, dating back to my teenage years, and am now in my late twenties. I understand an employer's apprehension when considering me for a job, even after all these years of living a constructive life, but I believe the roots of that apprehension are manufactured by the media. In reality, it is a huge task for an ex-offender to go to school and even develop the qualifications for IT work, and in my personal experience and from volunteering to help employ other ex-offenders, I believe someone who has invested that amount of effort into pursuing that career is far less likely to throw it away by doing something stupid. Most active criminals/addicts can't hold it together enough to get through college and perform the duties expected of an IT worker. They don't invest huge amounts of effort and time playing it straight for years so they can infiltrate companies and ruin everything. This character seems like an aberration to me.