Can't bring in outside food or drink anymore. Can't even bring in a backpack, either - post 9/11 fears and "anti-piracy measures" gone too far.
Where are you seeing movies? I've carried in backpacks, folding chairs, all kinds of stuff. Sometimes they want to take a look inside first, but big deal.
And the AMC Century 14 doesn't care if you bring in outside food and drink... so long as it's from the food court just across from the theatre.;-) Which isn't a bad food court, so it seems like a good deal to me.
What they really need to start doing is serving better food. Arclight Cinemas have got it right: the concession stands sell gourmet sausages instead of hot dogs, and they have a full-service restaurant with a small but really good menu in the lobby. When you get seated, they write your show time on a slip of paper and leave it on the table for your server. That way they know when you need to pay the check. (And since the theatre seats are reserved, you don't have to worry about getting there early... you walk in 30 seconds before showtime and you're fine.)
In such a situation how do you keep people buying the DVD? I don't think you can, hence the schism and hypocrisy in such actions which the artical goes on about.
What they want is to sell you the movie at least two times. First, see it on the big screen; then take it home with you. If they market it to you both ways, the chances are better that you'll buy at least one of them.
So first, you have to convince people that there is no substitute for seeing the movie in the theatre. If you really want the experience, you *have* to pay your $11 and scramble for a good seat (unless you go to a civilized theatre with reserved seating). But, eventually, that experience won't be available anymore. Your *only* option will be to buy the video or DVD. Now it's yours forever, whenever you want. Oh, and by the way, in a decade or two we'll do a big re-release in theatres, and you just *have* to see it again.
You know a market is at saturation when they're trying to get you to buy the same product more than once. Look at TV Guide... coming out with the *exact same* info and five different "collector" covers. You MUST buy five copies of the same publication, or you'll miss something!
When I was a kid, I saw some films in "Cinerama", which had three separate projectors and a wrap-around screen.
Come visit Los Angeles, and see actual Cinerama movies shown at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. They spent 18 months restoring the theatre and building a new megaplex behind it, and now are showing restored prints of stuff like This is Cinerama! and How the West Was Won. Last I knew (which was when they did a whole presentation before a showing of Lawrence of Arabia, just before they closed the theatre for renovation) they're also working on restoring a camera and making *new* footage.
But apparently, there's only two operational Cinerama theatres left in the world... this one and the one at the Motion Picture Museum in Bradford, UK.
IMAX is quite comparable to Cinerama at any rate, from what I've seen. And a heck of a lot easier to produce and show, since it's a single strip of film instead of three separate ones.
Make Better Movies, make us WANT to go to the theatre, make us excited enough to go, otherwise they will destroy themselves fighting a trend that will never cease to move forward.
One problem: they've already done this. At least, according to an Australian friend of mine, they have experimented there with releasing movies simultaneously on video and in the theatre, and found that theatre results were unchanged... and video sales were non-existent (sorry, can't find a link to verify this, but he's not known for making stuff up).
There is no substitute for seeing a movie in a theatre, no matter how good your home theatre system is. If you want the theatre experience, you will pay for it... otherwise, movie ticket prices wouldn't have increased by 38% over the last decade, while the CPI has risen 24% (using my own memories of paying $8 to see a movie in college, versus paying $11 at most theatres now... and the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data for Los Angeles, where I live).
This is not about recovering lost sales. It's about control over who sees what when. It's about the fear that if people get used to seeing what they want how they want when they want, they *might* lose control, and someday may lose money too. But in my opinion, they're digging their own grave.
I would hope that the person doesn't give their c/c number to everybody... in any case I'd jail the person+address, not the c/c number (as they could have more than one c/c). This obviously implies that to subscribe to 'my' MMPORG you'd have to give out your real contact information.
So, your account wouldn't activate until you'd responded with the code they mailed you to your home address? So you could verify that you gave out real contact information?
the whole family wouldn't be jailed, only Timmy's character would be jailed: the rest of the family wouldn't be able to create new characters while the punishment lasts, though.
I don't see the problem: actually if you have a family to back you you can be sure that little Timmy won't be a bad boy any time soon: call this a 'compound punishment' or something:)
This is a technique commonly used in prison and the military, where the entire group is punished for the transgressions of a single member. It's designed to demoralize the entire group, and prevent any alliances from forming. It's very effective in exerting extreme control over a large number of people with a relatively small force of authority figures.
I'm not sure it's a great business model, however. If little Timmy's dad can't create a new character because his son requested services of a female avatar in an inappropriate manner, there are many possible results, but the most likely seems that dad would cancel everyone's accounts and call a lawyer. After all, *he* is being deprived of full use of the product for something someone else did. (Not that he'd win, necessarily, but what company wants to get into this?)
Of course, it's possible that it will work just as well as it does in the military and in prison, and dad will take it out of little Timmy's hide so he can be sure that big sister Ginny isn't going to get any ideas.
>> How do you prevent a bigger Timmy from borrowing his friend's info?
again, what's the problem here? if the friend is so stupid to give his info out, he's gonna pay for his mistake (and likely won't repeat it in the future).
No, he won't. First, big Timmy gets in trouble. Then he says "Oops... um, Joe, can you sign me up for a new account?" Now Timmy knows better which lines to cross. On the other hand, if Joe doesn't play the game, he doesn't care if Timmy messes up his record too.
You can be sure that the 'someone else' you pretended to be is a real person in real life which will obviously deal with you out of band.
If you screw up bad enough to be punished again. If you crossed a line, then you know better where the line is. You'll be more careful and be more likely to get away with it next time.
The whole point of the 'virtual jail' is not really to be part of the gaming experience, it's to provide a real deterrent to game-disrupting behaviour.
But these are games people *pay* to play. You introduce this "deterrent" and you'll deter all right... you'll deter people from even signing up for the game at all. Maybe it will only be people who you don't really want there anyway... but there are liable to be plenty of people who think that they don't even want to take the risk.
the way I see it they'd lead to people being more careful about their accounts and -definitely- having a strong incentive not to break the in-game laws...
The only "laws" that have an enforcement issue have to do with harrassment of other players. Any other kind of "law" can be coded right into the game. It's what you say to other people, and how your actions interfere with *their* gaming experience, that can't be directly controlled by the developers.
So the offenses are often quite subjective. How do you go about punishing people? How do you decide who "started it" and who is "right"? Have you come up with a concept for a trial system to go with your virtual jail? Will my law-abiding, upstanding community member of a character have to serve jury duty?
I don't think you understood my post: if you have a jail sentence you would not be ALLOWED to start a new account (after all the billing information would stay the same).
So what you're actually doing is jailing the credit card number, not the person.
What if everyone in the family has an account, using the same number? Do they all get jailed when little Timmy thinks harrassment is fun?
How do you prevent a bigger Timmy from borrowing his friend's info? People do that anyway when they don't have a credit card they can use.
How about game cards? How would you prevent people from using those to start a new account?
The problem is one of identity. Your identity has to be valuable to you in the online world in order for any punishment to take effect. If you can just pretend to be someone else for a while, and evade punishment, what's to prevent you?
The only interesting question (which was not, interestingly enough, brought up by this article) is "Will the internet decay into a shithole completely devoid of personal accountability or will it slowly evolve into a place where people realize that everyone they're chatting with have feelings too"?
The article definitely did bring this up in the final example with Second Life. They point out that the community participation made people feel more satisfied with the outcome of the taxation issue, even when they were on the losing side. (I don't know how much research they did to come to this conclusion, but let's just stipulate that they're omniscient on this point for now.)
I think the main point the author was getting at was that instead of government-like enforcement and punishment, online games should do more to encourage and leverage that sense of community if they want to enforce good behavior.
Actually, the karma system with/. seems to be an interesting implementation of this principle. You can post anonymously, sure... but, people are less likely to see your post, and those who do take it less seriously. You are rewarded for developing a positive identity, because you have a stronger voice. If you want to be a jerk, go right ahead, but most people simply won't hear you anymore after a while.
Internet interaction can be worthwhile and positive, if people have an investment in maintaining a good reputation. It's giving them that investment which is tricky. SWG only allows one character per server... that seems to make a difference (anyway, I've run into way fewer jerks, a*holes, and idiots in that game than in other MMOGs I've played). In a world where sticks just drive the mule out of the barn, coming up with tasty but well-balanced carrots is a vital process.
If you delete the player account somebody will just recreate a new one and, helped by their guild, fairly rapidly regain lost levels/items: a sentence of, say, 40 hours of jail (tic-tac-toe) would be much worse, don't you think?
What's the difference? How many people will go through 40 hours of "jail" rather than just start a new account? People who get into that kind of trouble rarely start out with any kind of respect for the game systems. They will see "jail" as another thing for them to cheat, exploit, or otherwise work their way around.
Furthermore, given the recitivism rates from our real-world prisons, warehousing people who are already on society's bad side doesn't do anything at all to make that person feel like it was a bad idea to break the rules. Now, if you found a way to make it so that people who cheated others, for example, had their game earnings garnished to pay back their debt, you might make some sort of impression... the old "crime doesn't pay" track. But simply locking them up seems unlikely to help in any way at all.
You have grown up in a culture that has ingrained upon you that there are no consequences to your actions, and as a result, you prefer games that reflect this.
I don't necessarily think this is true. In some cases, yes, it is... but let's remember that games are, for the most part, escapism. The more like our real lives they are, the less "fun" they are. Why should I play a game that forces me to concentrate super hard on every move, not knowing where the traps are, if I can just go upstairs and have a conversation with my mom for the same thrill?
Meanwhile, new online gamers have no respect for any of their opponents, and online boards are full of trash talk, elitism, & self-importance.
And that's where you hit upon the point of the article. The conventions developed for the single-player game world have been forcibly imported by an expectant audience to the multi-player world. There's only one problem: the other players. That's what we haven't really wrapped our tiny monkey brains around yet... how do we keep people from treating each other like garbage without removing the "fun" from the game?
And I enjoy a good read about games, gaming, nerdy stuff in general. But that article was kind of meatless. Like a soup made of mostly water. I didn't see any profound concepts or ideas or even a point other than, "in games you can die and it's interesting that people can choose to kill or help others in games."
Well, here's my take on it, then, since I seemed to get more out of it than you did:
Social interaction in multi-player games is forced, by conventions established in single-player games, to have a very weak system of punishment for transgressions. This means that those who operate the game world have little power to prevent people from engaging in undesirable behavior, in cases where it is either imprudent or impossible to hard-code the behavior out. As a result, people seem to get along better in games where there is a stronger sense of community, because there is more of a feeling of having something to lose if your account is banned or if you piss off all your friends.
Multi-player game developers can leverage this sense of community to forge game policies which are acceptable to the playerbase as a whole, by allowing and responding to democratized participation. Second Life is an example of this "democracy in action," where even those who didn't get their way seemed willing to carry on under the new rules simply because they played a part in the debate.
I know privacy advocates hate this kind of talk. Any discussion of putting in a trackable number/code in chip, for example, is scoffed at. While I realize how easy it would be to abuse such a system, there are many advantages.
While there are extremists in every realm, it seems that the most important thing privacy advocates have to say is that you should be able to decide who gets your information, and know exactly how they use it. It's one thing to know that you have a unique identity online, and you have to use that to sign up for a game. It's another if they're grabbing your MAC address without your knowledge and using it to correlate your online activities.
So far, in SWG, it seems people are far more mature than in other MMOGs I've played. One reason might be because there's only one character permitted per server. Sure, people buy second accounts... but those who can afford to do that usually have been around long enough to realize that being a class one jerk carries only ephemeral satisfaction. In general, though, people know that it's at least a major hassle to change identities without losing all your stuff. Oh, and, it requires the cooperation of at least one other character... difficult to get if you've alienated everyone on your server.
Even if this was true (which, based on later posts, it is not) I'm not sure how this is relevant to the state of the grid which supplies the power to people.
most of that power is generated during the "peak hours" when our current system is most strained
Like, say, at night?
No, peak hours for power consumption are during the day, in the afternoon... around 2-3 p.m. Remember the old TV ads: "Give your appliances the afternoon off"? They encouraged people to run their washing machines and stuff later in the evening or early in the morning, to avoid peak times.
Remember, at about 5:00 p.m. power consumption goes down drastically, because many businesses close down. It takes a lot more power to light a whole bank or office building than your living room. Most of the nighttime hours, people are asleep, and we consume the least electricity when we're not doing anything but breathing.
and hunt down and eliminate your phantom loads in your house.
How do I do this? I've been wanting to analyze our power usage, but I don't have the faintest idea where to begin. Also, I'm in an apartment, so that may make a difference.
The grid is falling apart because environmental lawsuits have effectively KILLED any and ALL attempts to modernize it.
That's odd... here in Southern California, I grew up in the City of Los Angeles, which has its own municipal power provider (LA DWP). They've been continuously upgrading their power generation and provision infrastructure all along, and as a result, offer reliable power at a lower price (also, they don't have to profit off the service, which helps keep prices lower).
Now I live in City of West Hollywood, which gets power from Southern California Edison. We have at least one power blink a month, and have had power outages of more than a few minutes at least three times in the 18 months I've lived there. This is without any adverse weather to explain the power outage.
Seems that DWP has been able to upgrade their grid and provide a larger percentage of renewable power sources just fine, even under California's highly restrictive environmental laws. Perhaps Arizona should look into what they've done and see where the difference lies.
Well, that's sensible if you ignore the half million or so infections by Blaster - which clearly this article does.
Not entirely... they do mention that "covert and overt" attacks combined are estimated to be responsible for about $28.2 billion in damages, which includes worms and viruses. And though they don't point it out directly, they give you the information to calculate that the active, deliberate attacks they are talking about in the first paragraph account for only about 2.5% of that number.
So 67% of 2.5% of the damage happens because of malicious attacks against Linux servers. That's $473,690,000 worth of damage according to them, which is less than 2% of the total computer vandalism bill. At the same time, "The Sobig and MSBlast malware that afflict Microsoft platforms contributed significantly" to the figure, which in my book means they accounted for at least... say... 10% of it. (In reality, it's almost guaranteed to be more on the lines of 60%, especially since these numbers are just from August). So those two worms probably cost at least 5 times as much as direct hacks against all Linux servers, using all tools available.
That's all in the article. Too bad most people don't read between the lines that well.
However, how many of those windows servers took part in massive worms? Those aren't attacked, those are automated attacks, and not considered.
Well, not directly, but in these paragraphs...
The overall economic damage in August from overt and covert attacks as well as viruses and worms stood at an all-time high of $28.2-billion.
The Sobig and MSBlast malware that afflict Microsoft platforms contributed significantly to the record estimate.
So even if they're not malicious, directed attacks, the article owns up that viruses and worms have a huge detrimental impact. The fact that the attacks included in the main data amounted to about $707 million, which is only 2.5% of the $28.2 billion from all "covert and overt" (maybe more accurate terms would be "passive and active") attacks, indicates that viruses and worms are a much more expensive and widespread problem than the incursions they chose to focus on here.
So let me get this right. Since third party applications under Linux get hacked, it is attributed to Linux being more vulnerable while MS Windows running third party software is more secure??? So a PHP/SQL injection exploit is attributed to the OS PHP is installed on?
Ok, let's put in the disclaimer that, if murder was legal and didn't breach my own personal sense of morality, Bill Gates might be dead. I'm no lover of Microsoft, its software, its policies, its business practices, or its sociopathic paper-clip mascot.
But, I want to remind folks of this article, posted about a month ago, in which it was revealed that only half of Windows OS crashes actually happen because of Microsoft code. The general feeling there, and I agree, is that if a third party application can crash the OS, it still implies a faulty OS.
This is a different situation, but what the OS will let an application flaw do is still at issue. In the interest of fairness, it's important to consider just what third-party vulnerabilities can do to a Linux system, and whether the OS should be able to insulate them.
Without knowing anything about the types of hacks they included in this dataset, it's very difficult to examine this question. Certainly, it doesn't matter much what the OS does if the scripting language allows unauthorized changes to web content; that has nothing to do with how the OS runs. But given that we have been highly critical of MS for letting 3rd party stuff cause problems, it might not be prudent to dismiss this account out of hand.
Yes, my Linux server is certainly being attacked constantly. I know this because I keep finding entries like these in the apache log files: 212.181.127.182 xxxxxxxx.org - [08/Sep/2003:21:36:02 +0100] "GET/MSADC/root.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0" 404 12.242.55.56 xxxxxxxx.org - [09/Sep/2003:21:41:54 +0100] "get/scripts/..%c0%af..%c0%af..%c0%af.. %c0%af..%c0%af..%c0%af..%c0%af..%c0%af/winnt/syste m32/cmd.exe?/c%20dir" 501 62.194.103.198 xxxxxxxx.org - [11/Sep/2003:10:31:35 +0100] "GET/scripts/nsiislog.dll" 404
Since the article is discussing successful attacks only, however, this attempt would not be in the dataset.
However, public and private keys will suddenly become tokens of value to spammers. Suddenly people will start creating worms, and scripted attacks to pull peoples keys. They will start trying to break into machines. It'll create a black market for trusted keys the world over. They'll just be new attacks, and new problems. Creating a large scale web of trust, won't work. A worm can easily go steal the tokens of trust, and then start using them to spam with. It'll just be another arms race.
It will be a lot like the business of selling addresses for junk snail-mail. Not terribly difficult to get, but somewhat resource-consuming. It will up the ante for those who want to send spam, and will turn a lot of those lists of 30 million recipients to the 30,000 or so they could get more easily. It wouldn't eradicate spam, but it would lower the rate of return by a whole lot to clutter your list with tons of people who don't want your ad. That would really, really help.
Now letting forcing people to sign with your key is probably the most doable, but it also means that running mailing list software is a real, real CPU intensive application. I'm not particularly thrilled with that.
Er, why? Are you trying to send thousands and millions of e-mails a day? It would mean that legitimate businesses with a lot of email to send, such as reputable online shopping sites, would probably have to buy another couple of dedicated servers for the task. It would be an expense, but not an ongoing one, and one that is theoretically proportional to your profits. It would price some people right out of the mass-mail game, though... the people who right now can afford to send 10,000 emails for every one order they get.
The only way to stop spam is to make it stop being cost effective, that involves causing e-mail to be an expensive operation if it involves untrusted e-mail servers.
Never mind, I shouldn't have bothered... you answered your own objection.
A company that buys a license is doing so based on their particular beliefs about the situation. For some companies it's just easier to buy a license and possibly sue for damages later.
Well, as put a couple of posts above: Paying SCO so that SCO will [have] the right to audit you seems to me to be wasting money and aquiring a liability.
In other words... If a company you do business with, i.e. they have you in their customer database, has a licensing agreement with a company like SCO, then your vendor is creating obligations that could entangle you at some point. Besides which, they're raising their own costs and passing it on to you, their customer.
So, if a company decided to buy a license or four as a CYA measure, they probably wouldn't want this to be public knowledge. And if they were a big enough company, they could probably make a deal with SCO that would keep it from being public knowledge too. It doesn't seem like disclosure is something that SCO regards very highly anyway.
The highest tax rate in california as o per student than we did in the 70's and even early 80's. I'll get the exact numbers later if I have the time. We can double the amount we spend, and if we have triple the students, our education will still go downhill.
-- the problem, at least to me, is obviously one of admistration and accountability.
So are you running for governor, since it's such an easy job? Since the solutions are so obvious? Since people are just not administrating things properly, and are not being held accountable, and that's all the problem is? You tell me what you've read in all those publicly-available reports that, for accountability purposes, the state government publishes on everything they do, and what they've so clearly omitted or screwed up.
It's easy to be an armchair official. Spend a day or two inside a government agency and see how clear-cut this all is. -- "[T]he working stiffs...They make $75-100k a year. That's not much to live on." - Jack Valenti on who piracy hurts most f 01/01/2003 is 9.6%. Davis was talking, very soon after the election of raising that to 11%. BTW, last year, the year you claim the highest tax was 7.77%, is in fact 9.3%. You better have your accountant look over your income tax for last year -- I think you're screwed.
No, actually, I'm not. I paid 7.77% of my taxable income in state taxes. Do you know how tax brackets work? There's a portion that I paid 9.6% on, and a portion I paid less than that, and a portion I didn't pay on at all. So I paid 7.77%. That's what it comes out to. No one is paying "almost 10%" of their taxable income in state taxes. Anyone who is paying 9.6% of any of their income is still getting the same amount tax-free as everyone else, and a good chunk at less than 9.6%. As your income approaches infinity, the percentage you pay in taxes approaches, but never reaches, 9.6%. As a practical matter, for 95% of the population, it will stay below 8%.
It's not greedy to want to keep at least 50% of the money I earn.
And you don't? Wait, 90% > 50% in my world. Oh, yeah, fed taxes. Make that 70% > 50%.
It's not greedy to believe that california's problem isn't that we don't spend enough on education -- we spend more now than ever before, but we're still rated 49 (thank god for mississippi)
We spend, in inflation-adjusted dollars, far, far less per student than we did in the 70's and even early 80's. I'll get the exact numbers later if I have the time. We can double the amount we spend, and if we have triple the students, our education will still go downhill.
-- the problem, at least to me, is obviously one of admistration and accountability.
So are you running for governor, since it's such an easy job? Since the solutions are so obvious? Since people are just not administrating things properly, and are not being held accountable, and that's all the problem is? You tell me what you've read in all those publicly-available reports that, for accountability purposes, the state government publishes on everything they do, and what they've so clearly omitted or screwed up.
It's easy to be an armchair official. Spend a day or two inside a government agency and see how clear-cut this all is.
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Can't bring in outside food or drink anymore. Can't even bring in a backpack, either - post 9/11 fears and "anti-piracy measures" gone too far.
;-) Which isn't a bad food court, so it seems like a good deal to me.
Where are you seeing movies? I've carried in backpacks, folding chairs, all kinds of stuff. Sometimes they want to take a look inside first, but big deal.
And the AMC Century 14 doesn't care if you bring in outside food and drink... so long as it's from the food court just across from the theatre.
What they really need to start doing is serving better food. Arclight Cinemas have got it right: the concession stands sell gourmet sausages instead of hot dogs, and they have a full-service restaurant with a small but really good menu in the lobby. When you get seated, they write your show time on a slip of paper and leave it on the table for your server. That way they know when you need to pay the check. (And since the theatre seats are reserved, you don't have to worry about getting there early... you walk in 30 seconds before showtime and you're fine.)
In such a situation how do you keep people buying the DVD? I don't think you can, hence the schism and hypocrisy in such actions which the artical goes on about.
What they want is to sell you the movie at least two times. First, see it on the big screen; then take it home with you. If they market it to you both ways, the chances are better that you'll buy at least one of them.
So first, you have to convince people that there is no substitute for seeing the movie in the theatre. If you really want the experience, you *have* to pay your $11 and scramble for a good seat (unless you go to a civilized theatre with reserved seating). But, eventually, that experience won't be available anymore. Your *only* option will be to buy the video or DVD. Now it's yours forever, whenever you want. Oh, and by the way, in a decade or two we'll do a big re-release in theatres, and you just *have* to see it again.
You know a market is at saturation when they're trying to get you to buy the same product more than once. Look at TV Guide... coming out with the *exact same* info and five different "collector" covers. You MUST buy five copies of the same publication, or you'll miss something!
When I was a kid, I saw some films in "Cinerama", which had three separate projectors and a wrap-around screen.
Come visit Los Angeles, and see actual Cinerama movies shown at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. They spent 18 months restoring the theatre and building a new megaplex behind it, and now are showing restored prints of stuff like This is Cinerama! and How the West Was Won. Last I knew (which was when they did a whole presentation before a showing of Lawrence of Arabia, just before they closed the theatre for renovation) they're also working on restoring a camera and making *new* footage.
But apparently, there's only two operational Cinerama theatres left in the world... this one and the one at the Motion Picture Museum in Bradford, UK.
IMAX is quite comparable to Cinerama at any rate, from what I've seen. And a heck of a lot easier to produce and show, since it's a single strip of film instead of three separate ones.
Make Better Movies, make us WANT to go to the theatre, make us excited enough to go, otherwise they will destroy themselves fighting a trend that will never cease to move forward.
One problem: they've already done this. At least, according to an Australian friend of mine, they have experimented there with releasing movies simultaneously on video and in the theatre, and found that theatre results were unchanged... and video sales were non-existent (sorry, can't find a link to verify this, but he's not known for making stuff up).
There is no substitute for seeing a movie in a theatre, no matter how good your home theatre system is. If you want the theatre experience, you will pay for it... otherwise, movie ticket prices wouldn't have increased by 38% over the last decade, while the CPI has risen 24% (using my own memories of paying $8 to see a movie in college, versus paying $11 at most theatres now... and the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data for Los Angeles, where I live).
This is not about recovering lost sales. It's about control over who sees what when. It's about the fear that if people get used to seeing what they want how they want when they want, they *might* lose control, and someday may lose money too. But in my opinion, they're digging their own grave.
...and one from the BATF prohibiting its use in advertising alcohol (this one is for wine, it appears in each section though).
But... I'll bet a good enough lawyer could convince a judge that "reddish-brown spots" *are* a subliminal advertisement for wine...
I would hope that the person doesn't give their c/c number to everybody... in any case I'd jail the person+address, not the c/c number (as they could have more than one c/c). This obviously implies that to subscribe to 'my' MMPORG you'd have to give out your real contact information.
:)
So, your account wouldn't activate until you'd responded with the code they mailed you to your home address? So you could verify that you gave out real contact information?
the whole family wouldn't be jailed, only Timmy's character would be jailed: the rest of the family wouldn't be able to create new characters while the punishment lasts, though.
I don't see the problem: actually if you have a family to back you you can be sure that little Timmy won't be a bad boy any time soon: call this a 'compound punishment' or something
This is a technique commonly used in prison and the military, where the entire group is punished for the transgressions of a single member. It's designed to demoralize the entire group, and prevent any alliances from forming. It's very effective in exerting extreme control over a large number of people with a relatively small force of authority figures.
I'm not sure it's a great business model, however. If little Timmy's dad can't create a new character because his son requested services of a female avatar in an inappropriate manner, there are many possible results, but the most likely seems that dad would cancel everyone's accounts and call a lawyer. After all, *he* is being deprived of full use of the product for something someone else did. (Not that he'd win, necessarily, but what company wants to get into this?)
Of course, it's possible that it will work just as well as it does in the military and in prison, and dad will take it out of little Timmy's hide so he can be sure that big sister Ginny isn't going to get any ideas.
>> How do you prevent a bigger Timmy from borrowing his friend's info?
again, what's the problem here? if the friend is so stupid to give his info out, he's gonna pay for his mistake (and likely won't repeat it in the future).
No, he won't. First, big Timmy gets in trouble. Then he says "Oops... um, Joe, can you sign me up for a new account?" Now Timmy knows better which lines to cross. On the other hand, if Joe doesn't play the game, he doesn't care if Timmy messes up his record too.
You can be sure that the 'someone else' you pretended to be is a real person in real life which will obviously deal with you out of band.
If you screw up bad enough to be punished again. If you crossed a line, then you know better where the line is. You'll be more careful and be more likely to get away with it next time.
The whole point of the 'virtual jail' is not really to be part of the gaming experience, it's to provide a real deterrent to game-disrupting behaviour.
But these are games people *pay* to play. You introduce this "deterrent" and you'll deter all right... you'll deter people from even signing up for the game at all. Maybe it will only be people who you don't really want there anyway... but there are liable to be plenty of people who think that they don't even want to take the risk.
the way I see it they'd lead to people being more careful about their accounts and -definitely- having a strong incentive not to break the in-game laws...
The only "laws" that have an enforcement issue have to do with harrassment of other players. Any other kind of "law" can be coded right into the game. It's what you say to other people, and how your actions interfere with *their* gaming experience, that can't be directly controlled by the developers.
So the offenses are often quite subjective. How do you go about punishing people? How do you decide who "started it" and who is "right"? Have you come up with a concept for a trial system to go with your virtual jail? Will my law-abiding, upstanding community member of a character have to serve jury duty?
I don't think you understood my post: if you have a jail sentence you would not be ALLOWED to start a new account (after all the billing information would stay the same).
So what you're actually doing is jailing the credit card number, not the person.
What if everyone in the family has an account, using the same number? Do they all get jailed when little Timmy thinks harrassment is fun?
How do you prevent a bigger Timmy from borrowing his friend's info? People do that anyway when they don't have a credit card they can use.
How about game cards? How would you prevent people from using those to start a new account?
The problem is one of identity. Your identity has to be valuable to you in the online world in order for any punishment to take effect. If you can just pretend to be someone else for a while, and evade punishment, what's to prevent you?
The only interesting question (which was not, interestingly enough, brought up by this article) is "Will the internet decay into a shithole completely devoid of personal accountability or will it slowly evolve into a place where people realize that everyone they're chatting with have feelings too"?
/. seems to be an interesting implementation of this principle. You can post anonymously, sure... but, people are less likely to see your post, and those who do take it less seriously. You are rewarded for developing a positive identity, because you have a stronger voice. If you want to be a jerk, go right ahead, but most people simply won't hear you anymore after a while.
The article definitely did bring this up in the final example with Second Life. They point out that the community participation made people feel more satisfied with the outcome of the taxation issue, even when they were on the losing side. (I don't know how much research they did to come to this conclusion, but let's just stipulate that they're omniscient on this point for now.)
I think the main point the author was getting at was that instead of government-like enforcement and punishment, online games should do more to encourage and leverage that sense of community if they want to enforce good behavior.
Actually, the karma system with
Internet interaction can be worthwhile and positive, if people have an investment in maintaining a good reputation. It's giving them that investment which is tricky. SWG only allows one character per server... that seems to make a difference (anyway, I've run into way fewer jerks, a*holes, and idiots in that game than in other MMOGs I've played). In a world where sticks just drive the mule out of the barn, coming up with tasty but well-balanced carrots is a vital process.
If you delete the player account somebody will just recreate a new one and, helped by their guild, fairly rapidly regain lost levels/items: a sentence of, say, 40 hours of jail (tic-tac-toe) would be much worse, don't you think?
What's the difference? How many people will go through 40 hours of "jail" rather than just start a new account? People who get into that kind of trouble rarely start out with any kind of respect for the game systems. They will see "jail" as another thing for them to cheat, exploit, or otherwise work their way around.
Furthermore, given the recitivism rates from our real-world prisons, warehousing people who are already on society's bad side doesn't do anything at all to make that person feel like it was a bad idea to break the rules. Now, if you found a way to make it so that people who cheated others, for example, had their game earnings garnished to pay back their debt, you might make some sort of impression... the old "crime doesn't pay" track. But simply locking them up seems unlikely to help in any way at all.
You have grown up in a culture that has ingrained upon you that there are no consequences to your actions, and as a result, you prefer games that reflect this.
I don't necessarily think this is true. In some cases, yes, it is... but let's remember that games are, for the most part, escapism. The more like our real lives they are, the less "fun" they are. Why should I play a game that forces me to concentrate super hard on every move, not knowing where the traps are, if I can just go upstairs and have a conversation with my mom for the same thrill?
Meanwhile, new online gamers have no respect for any of their opponents, and online boards are full of trash talk, elitism, & self-importance.
And that's where you hit upon the point of the article. The conventions developed for the single-player game world have been forcibly imported by an expectant audience to the multi-player world. There's only one problem: the other players. That's what we haven't really wrapped our tiny monkey brains around yet... how do we keep people from treating each other like garbage without removing the "fun" from the game?
And I enjoy a good read about games, gaming, nerdy stuff in general. But that article was kind of meatless. Like a soup made of mostly water. I didn't see any profound concepts or ideas or even a point other than, "in games you can die and it's interesting that people can choose to kill or help others in games."
Well, here's my take on it, then, since I seemed to get more out of it than you did:
Social interaction in multi-player games is forced, by conventions established in single-player games, to have a very weak system of punishment for transgressions. This means that those who operate the game world have little power to prevent people from engaging in undesirable behavior, in cases where it is either imprudent or impossible to hard-code the behavior out. As a result, people seem to get along better in games where there is a stronger sense of community, because there is more of a feeling of having something to lose if your account is banned or if you piss off all your friends.
Multi-player game developers can leverage this sense of community to forge game policies which are acceptable to the playerbase as a whole, by allowing and responding to democratized participation. Second Life is an example of this "democracy in action," where even those who didn't get their way seemed willing to carry on under the new rules simply because they played a part in the debate.
Does it seem any more interesting now?
I know privacy advocates hate this kind of talk. Any discussion of putting in a trackable number/code in chip, for example, is scoffed at. While I realize how easy it would be to abuse such a system, there are many advantages.
While there are extremists in every realm, it seems that the most important thing privacy advocates have to say is that you should be able to decide who gets your information, and know exactly how they use it. It's one thing to know that you have a unique identity online, and you have to use that to sign up for a game. It's another if they're grabbing your MAC address without your knowledge and using it to correlate your online activities.
So far, in SWG, it seems people are far more mature than in other MMOGs I've played. One reason might be because there's only one character permitted per server. Sure, people buy second accounts... but those who can afford to do that usually have been around long enough to realize that being a class one jerk carries only ephemeral satisfaction. In general, though, people know that it's at least a major hassle to change identities without losing all your stuff. Oh, and, it requires the cooperation of at least one other character... difficult to get if you've alienated everyone on your server.
Most of DWP's power comes from Hoover Dam.
Even if this was true (which, based on later posts, it is not) I'm not sure how this is relevant to the state of the grid which supplies the power to people.
Like, say, at night?
No, peak hours for power consumption are during the day, in the afternoon... around 2-3 p.m. Remember the old TV ads: "Give your appliances the afternoon off"? They encouraged people to run their washing machines and stuff later in the evening or early in the morning, to avoid peak times.
Remember, at about 5:00 p.m. power consumption goes down drastically, because many businesses close down. It takes a lot more power to light a whole bank or office building than your living room. Most of the nighttime hours, people are asleep, and we consume the least electricity when we're not doing anything but breathing.
and hunt down and eliminate your phantom loads in your house.
How do I do this? I've been wanting to analyze our power usage, but I don't have the faintest idea where to begin. Also, I'm in an apartment, so that may make a difference.
The grid is falling apart because environmental lawsuits have effectively KILLED any and ALL attempts to modernize it.
That's odd... here in Southern California, I grew up in the City of Los Angeles, which has its own municipal power provider (LA DWP). They've been continuously upgrading their power generation and provision infrastructure all along, and as a result, offer reliable power at a lower price (also, they don't have to profit off the service, which helps keep prices lower).
Now I live in City of West Hollywood, which gets power from Southern California Edison. We have at least one power blink a month, and have had power outages of more than a few minutes at least three times in the 18 months I've lived there. This is without any adverse weather to explain the power outage.
Seems that DWP has been able to upgrade their grid and provide a larger percentage of renewable power sources just fine, even under California's highly restrictive environmental laws. Perhaps Arizona should look into what they've done and see where the difference lies.
They keep on knocking but they can't come in!
Well, if you RTFA, you find that this is based on "successful" attacks, not attempts.
Though it seems the credibility of the company who did this study is fairly infirm.
And for further reading...
Wired: Study Makes Less of Hack Threat
Vmyths: Hysteria roll call: mi2g
These people don't seem all that well-respected by those who know what they're about.
Well, that's sensible if you ignore the half million or so infections by Blaster - which clearly this article does.
Not entirely... they do mention that "covert and overt" attacks combined are estimated to be responsible for about $28.2 billion in damages, which includes worms and viruses. And though they don't point it out directly, they give you the information to calculate that the active, deliberate attacks they are talking about in the first paragraph account for only about 2.5% of that number.
So 67% of 2.5% of the damage happens because of malicious attacks against Linux servers. That's $473,690,000 worth of damage according to them, which is less than 2% of the total computer vandalism bill. At the same time, "The Sobig and MSBlast malware that afflict Microsoft platforms contributed significantly" to the figure, which in my book means they accounted for at least... say... 10% of it. (In reality, it's almost guaranteed to be more on the lines of 60%, especially since these numbers are just from August). So those two worms probably cost at least 5 times as much as direct hacks against all Linux servers, using all tools available.
That's all in the article. Too bad most people don't read between the lines that well.
Well, not directly, but in these paragraphs... So even if they're not malicious, directed attacks, the article owns up that viruses and worms have a huge detrimental impact. The fact that the attacks included in the main data amounted to about $707 million, which is only 2.5% of the $28.2 billion from all "covert and overt" (maybe more accurate terms would be "passive and active") attacks, indicates that viruses and worms are a much more expensive and widespread problem than the incursions they chose to focus on here.
So let me get this right. Since third party applications under Linux get hacked, it is attributed to Linux being more vulnerable while MS Windows running third party software is more secure??? So a PHP/SQL injection exploit is attributed to the OS PHP is installed on?
Ok, let's put in the disclaimer that, if murder was legal and didn't breach my own personal sense of morality, Bill Gates might be dead. I'm no lover of Microsoft, its software, its policies, its business practices, or its sociopathic paper-clip mascot.
But, I want to remind folks of this article, posted about a month ago, in which it was revealed that only half of Windows OS crashes actually happen because of Microsoft code. The general feeling there, and I agree, is that if a third party application can crash the OS, it still implies a faulty OS.
This is a different situation, but what the OS will let an application flaw do is still at issue. In the interest of fairness, it's important to consider just what third-party vulnerabilities can do to a Linux system, and whether the OS should be able to insulate them.
Without knowing anything about the types of hacks they included in this dataset, it's very difficult to examine this question. Certainly, it doesn't matter much what the OS does if the scripting language allows unauthorized changes to web content; that has nothing to do with how the OS runs. But given that we have been highly critical of MS for letting 3rd party stuff cause problems, it might not be prudent to dismiss this account out of hand.
Yes, my Linux server is certainly being attacked constantly. I know this because I keep finding entries like these in the apache log files: /MSADC/root.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0" 404 /scripts/..%c0%af..%c0%af..%c0%af.. %c0%af..%c0%af..%c0%af..%c0%af..%c0%af/winnt/syste m32/cmd.exe?/c%20dir" 501 /scripts/nsiislog.dll" 404
212.181.127.182 xxxxxxxx.org - [08/Sep/2003:21:36:02 +0100] "GET
12.242.55.56 xxxxxxxx.org - [09/Sep/2003:21:41:54 +0100] "get
62.194.103.198 xxxxxxxx.org - [11/Sep/2003:10:31:35 +0100] "GET
Since the article is discussing successful attacks only, however, this attempt would not be in the dataset.
However, public and private keys will suddenly become tokens of value to spammers. Suddenly people will start creating worms, and scripted attacks to pull peoples keys. They will start trying to break into machines. It'll create a black market for trusted keys the world over. They'll just be new attacks, and new problems. Creating a large scale web of trust, won't work. A worm can easily go steal the tokens of trust, and then start using them to spam with. It'll just be another arms race.
It will be a lot like the business of selling addresses for junk snail-mail. Not terribly difficult to get, but somewhat resource-consuming. It will up the ante for those who want to send spam, and will turn a lot of those lists of 30 million recipients to the 30,000 or so they could get more easily. It wouldn't eradicate spam, but it would lower the rate of return by a whole lot to clutter your list with tons of people who don't want your ad. That would really, really help.
Now letting forcing people to sign with your key is probably the most doable, but it also means that running mailing list software is a real, real CPU intensive application. I'm not particularly thrilled with that.
Er, why? Are you trying to send thousands and millions of e-mails a day? It would mean that legitimate businesses with a lot of email to send, such as reputable online shopping sites, would probably have to buy another couple of dedicated servers for the task. It would be an expense, but not an ongoing one, and one that is theoretically proportional to your profits. It would price some people right out of the mass-mail game, though... the people who right now can afford to send 10,000 emails for every one order they get.
The only way to stop spam is to make it stop being cost effective, that involves causing e-mail to be an expensive operation if it involves untrusted e-mail servers.
Never mind, I shouldn't have bothered... you answered your own objection.
Why would you care?
A company that buys a license is doing so based on their particular beliefs about the situation. For some companies it's just easier to buy a license and possibly sue for damages later.
Well, as put a couple of posts above: Paying SCO so that SCO will [have] the right to audit you seems to me to be wasting money and aquiring a liability.
In other words... If a company you do business with, i.e. they have you in their customer database, has a licensing agreement with a company like SCO, then your vendor is creating obligations that could entangle you at some point. Besides which, they're raising their own costs and passing it on to you, their customer.
So, if a company decided to buy a license or four as a CYA measure, they probably wouldn't want this to be public knowledge. And if they were a big enough company, they could probably make a deal with SCO that would keep it from being public knowledge too. It doesn't seem like disclosure is something that SCO regards very highly anyway.
The highest tax rate in california as o per student than we did in the 70's and even early 80's. I'll get the exact numbers later if I have the time. We can double the amount we spend, and if we have triple the students, our education will still go downhill.
-- the problem, at least to me, is obviously one of admistration and accountability.
So are you running for governor, since it's such an easy job? Since the solutions are so obvious? Since people are just not administrating things properly, and are not being held accountable, and that's all the problem is? You tell me what you've read in all those publicly-available reports that, for accountability purposes, the state government publishes on everything they do, and what they've so clearly omitted or screwed up.
It's easy to be an armchair official. Spend a day or two inside a government agency and see how clear-cut this all is.
--
"[T]he working stiffs...They make $75-100k a year. That's not much to live on." - Jack Valenti on who piracy hurts most f 01/01/2003 is 9.6%. Davis was talking, very soon after the election of raising that to 11%. BTW, last year, the year you claim the highest tax was 7.77%, is in fact 9.3%. You better have your accountant look over your income tax for last year -- I think you're screwed.
No, actually, I'm not. I paid 7.77% of my taxable income in state taxes. Do you know how tax brackets work? There's a portion that I paid 9.6% on, and a portion I paid less than that, and a portion I didn't pay on at all. So I paid 7.77%. That's what it comes out to. No one is paying "almost 10%" of their taxable income in state taxes. Anyone who is paying 9.6% of any of their income is still getting the same amount tax-free as everyone else, and a good chunk at less than 9.6%. As your income approaches infinity, the percentage you pay in taxes approaches, but never reaches, 9.6%. As a practical matter, for 95% of the population, it will stay below 8%.
It's not greedy to want to keep at least 50% of the money I earn.
And you don't? Wait, 90% > 50% in my world. Oh, yeah, fed taxes. Make that 70% > 50%.
It's not greedy to believe that california's problem isn't that we don't spend enough on education -- we spend more now than ever before, but we're still rated 49 (thank god for mississippi)
We spend, in inflation-adjusted dollars, far, far less per student than we did in the 70's and even early 80's. I'll get the exact numbers later if I have the time. We can double the amount we spend, and if we have triple the students, our education will still go downhill.
-- the problem, at least to me, is obviously one of admistration and accountability.
So are you running for governor, since it's such an easy job? Since the solutions are so obvious? Since people are just not administrating things properly, and are not being held accountable, and that's all the problem is? You tell me what you've read in all those publicly-available reports that, for accountability purposes, the state government publishes on everything they do, and what they've so clearly omitted or screwed up.
It's easy to be an armchair official. Spend a day or two inside a government agency and see how clear-cut this all is.