These various Spam Blocking Lists (or SBLs) are almost all automated. A few of them let you push a button and get removed. However some of them require manually emailing an explanation and still others try to extort money from you to speed up the unblocking process. We didn't even send any spam. The previous owners of the IP did.
If this isn't a strong argument that blacklisting systems are unethical, I don't know what is. Imagine being targeted by vigilantes because you bought a house which was previously occupied by a sex offender and so the addreess is listed on the local sex offender registry. That's essentially what's happening here.
There is no such thing as an "evil IP address" any more than there is an "evil house." These systems are technically, logically, as well as ethically flawed. Anybody who buys into blacklist-based technology is a reactionary and a bigot.
My wife and I drove over three hours to a different state to buy furniture. On the way, we stopped at a gas station and bought gas. Apparently, our credit union doesn't believe in such things as traveling from state to state, and flagged this is a suspicious transaction. Nevermind that we go to this neighboring state regularly and their "system" has never seen this as unusual. Of course, the card was silently suspended. This has happened a few times in the past, but we'd always received a phone call within minutes of it happening. No such call, so we remained oblivious and continued on.
Proceeded to drive to our destination, spent a few MORE hours picking out furniture, went to pay, and... Whoops. Luckily I managed to dig out a credit card from the depths of my wallet that I'd forgotten about, and which still worked, luckily. But it easily could have been a completely wasted day.
Of course, calling the credit union about it didn't help. They aren't open on the weekends. They can shut your account down kid, but they won't turn it back on again.
Imagine that. People occasionally drive into a neighboring state and... buy gas on the way! If that's not suspicious, what the hell is, right?
Slashdot has been around since before the word "blog" existed. At the time I joined I considered it a news source. Maybe it's changing, but there are reasons why a lot of us expect better from the front page. It wasn't always like this.
The place for hardware decoders is on the graphics card. Hence the reason why Linux needs to use the CPU.
Why? If you're going to be displaying the video on screen, then yeah, it makes sense to have it on the graphics card. But why can't we just have a general-purpose codec card? What if I don't want to display video, I just want to encode/decode it? Surely this is such a fundamental need that it deserves its own chip. If they can fit an encoder into a 1-pound handheld digital camcorder, why can't they put one on every motherboard?
Imagine that, maybe everybody doesn't think the same way you do.. and maybe that's not a bad thing. Paying for entertainment... who'da thunk it.
To each his own, I agree. But we're not talking a $39.95 monthly subscription. We're not even talking a $100 monthly subscription. That I can even understand. But we're talking $5900 for virtual furniture here.
Compare with bottled water. I also think this is a massive scam, but I don't have any problem with people who want to drink bottled water. As if it's any of my business. But a person who pays $5900 for a bottle of water? I think that's insane behavior. I don't think that makes me prejudiced.
Imagine i steal a bottle of whiskey from a supermarket but they catch me outside and recover the stolen bottle, would i not be arrsted and charge for theft, of course i would.
Imagine you pay me $5900 in return for me saying the following words: "You are in possession of a set of virtual furniture, and this is what it looks like: <Describes furniture>".
Okay, maybe that's a little crazy, but who knows. Perhaps there's some person out there willing to purchase this from you. They give you $5900 and now I'll say that THEY are the owners of the furniture. All of this is precisely equivalent to what has happened here, except that instead of a computer saying the furniture exists, *I* say the furniture exists.
Now, some punk comes along and punches me in the stomach and says "You better never say that guy has furniture, ever again, or I will shoot your ass." Of course, not wanting to die, I agree. Next day, you come up to me and ask about your furniture. I say, "Oh, sorry, that furniture is gone, you don't own it anymore."
Now, you are out $5900, and there is no furniture, no reason for any other person to pay you your $5900 back because the furniture doesn't exist. Why not? Because I say it doesn't. I walk away with $5900 in my pocket, you get fucked out of $5900 because you're a psychotic and a moron, and the kid? He's guilty of punching me in the stomach, nothing more.
Now imagine that the kid is arrested and charged with theft because of this very bizarre turn of events. He's arrested with theft because he's threatened me with physical violence in return for not claiming that a certain person has a certain item which doesn't really exist? What?
Can you not see how every aspect of this scenario is COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE?
The value of an item (physical or virtual) is what someone is willing to exchange for it, and what the government thinks about it is irrelevant.
Exactly. How much would you be willing to pay for this $5900 virtual furniture, knowing that the game world can take it away from you at will, or duplicate it a billion times, or that some hacker can take it away in an instant? I bet you'd pay zero. So how do you prevent the game world from taking it away or duplicating it? Pass a law saying they can't. Pass a law saying that the kid has committed virtual larceny. Otherwise this is all a fantasy.
Claim whatever you want -- your fantasy objects won't protect you from people with real physical force backing them up.
New challenge: show me a prototype that could convert solar power from orbit to the surface of the Earth in a controlled fashion and has a snowball's chance in hell of producing a statistically significant portion of the US electricity usage (5 trillion kilowatt-hours/year).
Not a fair challenge. In a world with renewable power generation, to the exclusion of fossil fuels, energy will be far more expensive. Therefore, demand will be lower. The 5 terawatt-hour per year figure is bogus in this scenario. You've rigged the challenge.
You want to show me where the prototype exists to convert a very-high-powered laser beam to an electricity source? Just one will do. Go on. Show me one example.
the plutonium produced by a fuel reprocessing breeder reactor is a mix of isotopes that can't be used in a nuclear warhead.
This statement intrigued me. I thought, "Why not just separate them?" A little Googling reveals that nobody really knows how to effectively separate Pu isotopes with any realistic efficiency. Learn something new every day, I guess.
Years of downloading MP3s has warped your moral definition of theft.
Years of hanging out in your mother's basement has warped you idea of what constitutes reality. We all depend every day on "virtual" objects to act as if they are real. The money in your bank account, the database which indicates how many shares of Intel stock you own. The only reason any of this is "real" is because we have laws which say so. Without the laws, it is all NOTHING. I'm not even getting into the comparison between copyright infrigement and theft, here. There was no copyright, there was no physical property, THERE WAS NO CRIME AT ALL, except the crime of breaking into a secure computer system.
Morality doesn't even enter the question. The fact is, this game isn't real, the objects people purchase with true currency in the game aren't real, they do not enjoy legal protection of any kind, and anybody who spends money on something which can be taken away, legally, in the blink of an eye, is an idiot.
So, if someone puts money in a brokerage account and it gets hacked, is it the victim's fault, too?
The "reality" of electronic currency is created by LAW. If somebody takes the money out of your account electronically, there is REAL WORLD HURT because the laws of the land say that "Money cannot be created out of thin air, except by the goverment." Therefore somebody has to PAY in order for you to get your money back. I don't see how I can make the concept any clearer -- virtual property can only have true value if laws, backed by force, declare that it does. Without those laws, virtual property is worthless, and anybody who pays real currency for such property is certifiable.
I suppose someone who has a Ph.D. in physics would say that quantum mechanics is pretty elementary stuff.
Depends. The mathematic behind quantum mechanics is not exactly "elementary" but the basic ideas are. Wave functions, uncertainty, and quantum collapse, although weird, are easily grasped by most people. Just don't ask them to do the math on it. Same with computer security -- even if you don't know every gory detail, you should at least know what the basic components of a secure system is. Seriously, it isn't that hard to understand.
With all the world's computers connected together these days, it is a matter of personal responsibility to know at least SOME basic ideas behind computer security.
No, it's theft because the rightful owner is deprived of their goods, however temporarily.
THERE ARE NO GOODS. This is a row in a database.
Digital music files.
Digital music files have legal protection. It's called COPYRIGHT. This gives them ACTUAL VALUE. Try again, though.
Incidentally, a bank account is a virtual object.
The bank is not legally allowed to alter how much money is in my account. NOT THE CASE HERE. The game administrators could create thousands of these items instantly. That would devalue the investment. They could delete the item from virtual space entirely. Did this guy sign a contract saying that couldn't happen? The problem here isn't the fact that it's virtual. The problem is that there is nothing to stop the virtual object from being FUCKED WITH.
Nothing can happen an infinite number of times in a microsecond or any other finite unit of time
Of course it can. I have a variable called "Number Of Pieces Of Virtual Furniture." I set this to -1, which is a value I have declared to mean, "Infinity." Poof, there are now an infinite number of pieces of virtual furniture. Fuck, who needs a variable? There are an infinite number BECAUSE I SAY SO -- I choose to implement it that way.
If I set up an online storefront and charge $100 for virtual foozles, and people come by and buy the foozles for $100 a pop, then virtual foozles damned well are worth $100
They are worth $100 until you choose to say that you possess an infinite number of these items, which causes their value to drop to zero. Only a LAW which PREVENTS you from doing this will allow the items to retain their value.
How is this any different from someone stealing your name and password, logging into your personal computer, and stealing your Itunes files, destroying the originals in the process?
No different at all. But notice that the scenario you describe ISN'T THEFT EITHER. Destroying somebody's property is called VANDALISM. Perhaps COMPUTER CRIME.
Sure, an admin can create a new virtual item, but that doesn't balance things between him and his victims.
How does it not balance things? The kid goes to jail/probation for cracking (his ACTUAL crime), so he's punished. The freak with the furniture gets his "property" back. What is lacking here?
Personally, I think any virtual reality game that will willingly take thousands of your real dollars in return for a few bits in a stick of RAM somewhere is committing fraud, but hey... I don't play these games. And just to preempt your comparison with the stock market or whatever... There are LAWS in place which are meant to help financial instruments to retain their value. I can't just diddle a number in a computer and triple the number of shares of Apple I own. THAT'S ILLEGAL. But the game administrator could quite easily and legally make a billion copies of this guy's "expensive furniture" and sell them for dirt cheap, massively devaluing his "investment." Like I said, only a completely insane person would spend their money this way.
Now, if you want to talk about laws which elevate virtual property to a status similar to electronic funds and financial instruments, then we are playing a whole different game. But until that LEGAL PROTECTION is in place I will continue to believe that anybody spending money this way is completely nutso.
um, maybe I'm just crazy or an idiot, (possibly both) but I remember seeing a $500.00, 10 lb machine that could disable any car, ANY car without a diesel engine that was directly over or under it
I too know of such a machine. It only costs $300 though, it also weighs 10 pounds and takes up about the same amount of space, and it is effective once placed underneath or over a moving vehicle. It's called a "backpack filled with high explosive." Just leave THAT sucker on the roadway and hooo boy, that car is gonna stop for sure.
Because the determining factor of whether it's theft is not how easily or quickly the pilfered goods are replaced. The FDIC could replace my bank's funds WITH THE STROKE OF A PEN if it was robbed; that doesn't mean robbing it wouldn't be theft.
That's because the FDIC takes a hit when it does that. Tell me who suffers financially when the game administrators set everything back to the way it was? Did the kid do something stupid, obnoxious, illegal? Yeah, definitely. He committed a computer crime. Calling it theft is insane.
Right, because only crazy people spend money in ways you don't personally approve of.
Only crazy people spend their money on things which are valueless. Only a crazy person spends money on a virtual item which can be replicated thousands of times with no effort at all. Virtual objects are not containers of value. He might have thought his virtual furniture was actually WORTH $5900 but how can that possibly be the case when it can be copied literally an infinite number of times in a microsecond?
If you pass the patch through the same QA that initially let the bug exist, the added value is minor.
It's called REGRESSION TESTING. The point is to check that you haven't broken anything that wasn't broken before, NOT to test that your patch is "100% good-to-go-never-gonna-break-solid."
If I found out my bank deployed a hotfix that was whipped up by some sleep-deprived programmer and deployed without testing at 3:00 AM just to fix a security issue, I'd fucking quit that bank. Better to shut the whole god damn system off until it can be properly fixed. Seriously, I'm willing to wait. Idiots who won't wait can bank somewhere else.
How the fuck can there be theft in a world where the game administrators can reinstitute the guy's property WITH THE PUSH OF A BUTTON? It's not like this kid has "deprived" anybody of anything that can't be instantly recreated. Hell, applying the word "create" is even too generous.
The lunatic who spent $5900 on "virtual furniture" needs to be committed to a small, padded cell until he can get a grip on reality. And if the game admins refuse to give the furniture back to him, toss them in jail for fraud. And charge the kid with cracking, that's all he did.
This isn't cute. It's fucking nuts, and it scares the crap out of me that people are losing their grip on reality and people might go to prison for it. Holy shit.
Oh, the humanity! Imagine all the poor little penicillium molds in your bleu cheese, suffering and toiling to no good end. And the wretched yeasts which live in your beer, enslaved to a life of ethanol production. And don't even get me started on the fungal rights issues associated with kombucha tea.
Slashdot Mirror
Foreman, you idiot!
These various Spam Blocking Lists (or SBLs) are almost all automated. A few of them let you push a button and get removed. However some of them require manually emailing an explanation and still others try to extort money from you to speed up the unblocking process. We didn't even send any spam. The previous owners of the IP did.
If this isn't a strong argument that blacklisting systems are unethical, I don't know what is. Imagine being targeted by vigilantes because you bought a house which was previously occupied by a sex offender and so the addreess is listed on the local sex offender registry. That's essentially what's happening here.
There is no such thing as an "evil IP address" any more than there is an "evil house." These systems are technically, logically, as well as ethically flawed. Anybody who buys into blacklist-based technology is a reactionary and a bigot.
It should be a simple rule, really: Do not automatically disable anything that can't be automatically re-enabled. Two way street.
My wife and I drove over three hours to a different state to buy furniture. On the way, we stopped at a gas station and bought gas. Apparently, our credit union doesn't believe in such things as traveling from state to state, and flagged this is a suspicious transaction. Nevermind that we go to this neighboring state regularly and their "system" has never seen this as unusual. Of course, the card was silently suspended. This has happened a few times in the past, but we'd always received a phone call within minutes of it happening. No such call, so we remained oblivious and continued on.
Proceeded to drive to our destination, spent a few MORE hours picking out furniture, went to pay, and... Whoops. Luckily I managed to dig out a credit card from the depths of my wallet that I'd forgotten about, and which still worked, luckily. But it easily could have been a completely wasted day.
Of course, calling the credit union about it didn't help. They aren't open on the weekends. They can shut your account down kid, but they won't turn it back on again.
Imagine that. People occasionally drive into a neighboring state and... buy gas on the way! If that's not suspicious, what the hell is, right?
Slashdot has been around since before the word "blog" existed. At the time I joined I considered it a news source. Maybe it's changing, but there are reasons why a lot of us expect better from the front page. It wasn't always like this.
The place for hardware decoders is on the graphics card. Hence the reason why Linux needs to use the CPU.
Why? If you're going to be displaying the video on screen, then yeah, it makes sense to have it on the graphics card. But why can't we just have a general-purpose codec card? What if I don't want to display video, I just want to encode/decode it? Surely this is such a fundamental need that it deserves its own chip. If they can fit an encoder into a 1-pound handheld digital camcorder, why can't they put one on every motherboard?
Imagine that, maybe everybody doesn't think the same way you do.. and maybe that's not a bad thing. Paying for entertainment... who'da thunk it.
To each his own, I agree. But we're not talking a $39.95 monthly subscription. We're not even talking a $100 monthly subscription. That I can even understand. But we're talking $5900 for virtual furniture here.
Compare with bottled water. I also think this is a massive scam, but I don't have any problem with people who want to drink bottled water. As if it's any of my business. But a person who pays $5900 for a bottle of water? I think that's insane behavior. I don't think that makes me prejudiced.
Imagine i steal a bottle of whiskey from a supermarket but they catch me outside and recover the stolen bottle, would i not be arrsted and charge for theft, of course i would.
Imagine you pay me $5900 in return for me saying the following words: "You are in possession of a set of virtual furniture, and this is what it looks like: <Describes furniture>".
Okay, maybe that's a little crazy, but who knows. Perhaps there's some person out there willing to purchase this from you. They give you $5900 and now I'll say that THEY are the owners of the furniture. All of this is precisely equivalent to what has happened here, except that instead of a computer saying the furniture exists, *I* say the furniture exists.
Now, some punk comes along and punches me in the stomach and says "You better never say that guy has furniture, ever again, or I will shoot your ass." Of course, not wanting to die, I agree. Next day, you come up to me and ask about your furniture. I say, "Oh, sorry, that furniture is gone, you don't own it anymore."
Now, you are out $5900, and there is no furniture, no reason for any other person to pay you your $5900 back because the furniture doesn't exist. Why not? Because I say it doesn't. I walk away with $5900 in my pocket, you get fucked out of $5900 because you're a psychotic and a moron, and the kid? He's guilty of punching me in the stomach, nothing more.
Now imagine that the kid is arrested and charged with theft because of this very bizarre turn of events. He's arrested with theft because he's threatened me with physical violence in return for not claiming that a certain person has a certain item which doesn't really exist? What?
Can you not see how every aspect of this scenario is COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE?
The value of an item (physical or virtual) is what someone is willing to exchange for it, and what the government thinks about it is irrelevant.
Exactly. How much would you be willing to pay for this $5900 virtual furniture, knowing that the game world can take it away from you at will, or duplicate it a billion times, or that some hacker can take it away in an instant? I bet you'd pay zero. So how do you prevent the game world from taking it away or duplicating it? Pass a law saying they can't. Pass a law saying that the kid has committed virtual larceny. Otherwise this is all a fantasy.
Claim whatever you want -- your fantasy objects won't protect you from people with real physical force backing them up.
If you don't know every gory detail then how can you make intelligent decisions on where to spend your budget?
Trusted, informed opinions. We can't know every gory detail on every subject in the world and yet we seem to all do okay, by relying on experts.
New challenge: show me a prototype that could convert solar power from orbit to the surface of the Earth in a controlled fashion and has a snowball's chance in hell of producing a statistically significant portion of the US electricity usage (5 trillion kilowatt-hours/year).
Not a fair challenge. In a world with renewable power generation, to the exclusion of fossil fuels, energy will be far more expensive. Therefore, demand will be lower. The 5 terawatt-hour per year figure is bogus in this scenario. You've rigged the challenge.
You want to show me where the prototype exists to convert a very-high-powered laser beam to an electricity source? Just one will do. Go on. Show me one example.
Shine laser on big, black, unreflective object. Object gets REALLY FUCKING HOT. Heat turns steam turbine.
You didn't say it had to be 100% efficient. Why would it have to be, anyway? The sunlight is free.
the plutonium produced by a fuel reprocessing breeder reactor is a mix of isotopes that can't be used in a nuclear warhead.
This statement intrigued me. I thought, "Why not just separate them?" A little Googling reveals that nobody really knows how to effectively separate Pu isotopes with any realistic efficiency. Learn something new every day, I guess.
Years of downloading MP3s has warped your moral definition of theft.
Years of hanging out in your mother's basement has warped you idea of what constitutes reality. We all depend every day on "virtual" objects to act as if they are real. The money in your bank account, the database which indicates how many shares of Intel stock you own. The only reason any of this is "real" is because we have laws which say so. Without the laws, it is all NOTHING. I'm not even getting into the comparison between copyright infrigement and theft, here. There was no copyright, there was no physical property, THERE WAS NO CRIME AT ALL, except the crime of breaking into a secure computer system.
Morality doesn't even enter the question. The fact is, this game isn't real, the objects people purchase with true currency in the game aren't real, they do not enjoy legal protection of any kind, and anybody who spends money on something which can be taken away, legally, in the blink of an eye, is an idiot.
So, if someone puts money in a brokerage account and it gets hacked, is it the victim's fault, too?
The "reality" of electronic currency is created by LAW. If somebody takes the money out of your account electronically, there is REAL WORLD HURT because the laws of the land say that "Money cannot be created out of thin air, except by the goverment." Therefore somebody has to PAY in order for you to get your money back. I don't see how I can make the concept any clearer -- virtual property can only have true value if laws, backed by force, declare that it does. Without those laws, virtual property is worthless, and anybody who pays real currency for such property is certifiable.
I suppose someone who has a Ph.D. in physics would say that quantum mechanics is pretty elementary stuff.
Depends. The mathematic behind quantum mechanics is not exactly "elementary" but the basic ideas are. Wave functions, uncertainty, and quantum collapse, although weird, are easily grasped by most people. Just don't ask them to do the math on it. Same with computer security -- even if you don't know every gory detail, you should at least know what the basic components of a secure system is. Seriously, it isn't that hard to understand.
With all the world's computers connected together these days, it is a matter of personal responsibility to know at least SOME basic ideas behind computer security.
No, it's theft because the rightful owner is deprived of their goods, however temporarily.
THERE ARE NO GOODS. This is a row in a database.
Digital music files.
Digital music files have legal protection. It's called COPYRIGHT. This gives them ACTUAL VALUE. Try again, though.
Incidentally, a bank account is a virtual object.
The bank is not legally allowed to alter how much money is in my account. NOT THE CASE HERE. The game administrators could create thousands of these items instantly. That would devalue the investment. They could delete the item from virtual space entirely. Did this guy sign a contract saying that couldn't happen? The problem here isn't the fact that it's virtual. The problem is that there is nothing to stop the virtual object from being FUCKED WITH.
Nothing can happen an infinite number of times in a microsecond or any other finite unit of time
Of course it can. I have a variable called "Number Of Pieces Of Virtual Furniture." I set this to -1, which is a value I have declared to mean, "Infinity." Poof, there are now an infinite number of pieces of virtual furniture. Fuck, who needs a variable? There are an infinite number BECAUSE I SAY SO -- I choose to implement it that way.
If I set up an online storefront and charge $100 for virtual foozles, and people come by and buy the foozles for $100 a pop, then virtual foozles damned well are worth $100
They are worth $100 until you choose to say that you possess an infinite number of these items, which causes their value to drop to zero. Only a LAW which PREVENTS you from doing this will allow the items to retain their value.
How is this any different from someone stealing your name and password, logging into your personal computer, and stealing your Itunes files, destroying the originals in the process?
No different at all. But notice that the scenario you describe ISN'T THEFT EITHER. Destroying somebody's property is called VANDALISM. Perhaps COMPUTER CRIME.
Sure, an admin can create a new virtual item, but that doesn't balance things between him and his victims.
How does it not balance things? The kid goes to jail/probation for cracking (his ACTUAL crime), so he's punished. The freak with the furniture gets his "property" back. What is lacking here?
Personally, I think any virtual reality game that will willingly take thousands of your real dollars in return for a few bits in a stick of RAM somewhere is committing fraud, but hey... I don't play these games. And just to preempt your comparison with the stock market or whatever... There are LAWS in place which are meant to help financial instruments to retain their value. I can't just diddle a number in a computer and triple the number of shares of Apple I own. THAT'S ILLEGAL. But the game administrator could quite easily and legally make a billion copies of this guy's "expensive furniture" and sell them for dirt cheap, massively devaluing his "investment." Like I said, only a completely insane person would spend their money this way.
Now, if you want to talk about laws which elevate virtual property to a status similar to electronic funds and financial instruments, then we are playing a whole different game. But until that LEGAL PROTECTION is in place I will continue to believe that anybody spending money this way is completely nutso.
um, maybe I'm just crazy or an idiot, (possibly both) but I remember seeing a $500.00, 10 lb machine that could disable any car, ANY car without a diesel engine that was directly over or under it
I too know of such a machine. It only costs $300 though, it also weighs 10 pounds and takes up about the same amount of space, and it is effective once placed underneath or over a moving vehicle. It's called a "backpack filled with high explosive." Just leave THAT sucker on the roadway and hooo boy, that car is gonna stop for sure.
Fly-by-wire -- safe enough for airplanes, too dangerous for cars? Huh?
Because the determining factor of whether it's theft is not how easily or quickly the pilfered goods are replaced. The FDIC could replace my bank's funds WITH THE STROKE OF A PEN if it was robbed; that doesn't mean robbing it wouldn't be theft.
That's because the FDIC takes a hit when it does that. Tell me who suffers financially when the game administrators set everything back to the way it was? Did the kid do something stupid, obnoxious, illegal? Yeah, definitely. He committed a computer crime. Calling it theft is insane.
Right, because only crazy people spend money in ways you don't personally approve of.
Only crazy people spend their money on things which are valueless. Only a crazy person spends money on a virtual item which can be replicated thousands of times with no effort at all. Virtual objects are not containers of value. He might have thought his virtual furniture was actually WORTH $5900 but how can that possibly be the case when it can be copied literally an infinite number of times in a microsecond?
If you pass the patch through the same QA that initially let the bug exist, the added value is minor.
It's called REGRESSION TESTING. The point is to check that you haven't broken anything that wasn't broken before, NOT to test that your patch is "100% good-to-go-never-gonna-break-solid."
If I found out my bank deployed a hotfix that was whipped up by some sleep-deprived programmer and deployed without testing at 3:00 AM just to fix a security issue, I'd fucking quit that bank. Better to shut the whole god damn system off until it can be properly fixed. Seriously, I'm willing to wait. Idiots who won't wait can bank somewhere else.
How the fuck can there be theft in a world where the game administrators can reinstitute the guy's property WITH THE PUSH OF A BUTTON? It's not like this kid has "deprived" anybody of anything that can't be instantly recreated. Hell, applying the word "create" is even too generous.
The lunatic who spent $5900 on "virtual furniture" needs to be committed to a small, padded cell until he can get a grip on reality. And if the game admins refuse to give the furniture back to him, toss them in jail for fraud. And charge the kid with cracking, that's all he did.
This isn't cute. It's fucking nuts, and it scares the crap out of me that people are losing their grip on reality and people might go to prison for it. Holy shit.
Oh, the humanity! Imagine all the poor little penicillium molds in your bleu cheese, suffering and toiling to no good end. And the wretched yeasts which live in your beer, enslaved to a life of ethanol production. And don't even get me started on the fungal rights issues associated with kombucha tea.