"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80's
Thompson never wrote the "There's also a negative side" bit either.
Here's another quote to keep in mind:
"I don't know the percentage of the Internet that's valid, do you? Jesus, it's scary." -- Hunter S. Thompson, Atlantic Monthly interview, Aug. 26, 1997
Actually that is Minnesota where the guy is fed into a woodchipper, somewhere around the Bemidji/Brainerd area.
I mean, come on, that scene is set in a place with more than one tree. We don't have that luxury in North Dakota.
You're not going to be able to hide anything.
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
Ok, so they obfuscate the code by changing names around to gibberish, or in other words they're trying to impose a crude encryption on the code and then release it.
function blah();
gets transmuted into
function xglw()
and so forth, or so I assume. Even if you did bother to obfuscate all the brackets and other syntactical sugar, it would take simple cryptanalysis to bring the code back to readable status. How hard is it going to be to figure out that function xglw does certain things after you see it called from various places?
Your lawyer and your boss are idiots for the same reason various classmates were idiots back in college for trying to hand in other peoples' code with simple substitution performed on function and variable names. It's going to be a shock to your bosses when they find out they can't pull the same shit on the rest of the world that they did on their college professors.
..but a good way to whip a commercial provider into getting their shit together and actually carrying out the "provider" part. I come from a small town in the middle of nowhere that received cable from a company mostly interested in collecting bills and not providing much. Being in the sticks, it was the only company around for cable. So, the city council decides to build their own network using their own dish and equipment. Lo and behold, the outside company suddenly started offering great prices and service. Channels like HBO stopped cutting out intermittently. Complaints were answered.
Needless to say, a vast majority of the town signed on to the municipal network anyway, which has worked quite well to this day.
Nowadays, Lego comes in HUGE custom pieces. The sheer number of blocks you get in a Lego set these days is tiny compared to when I was 10. It involves a lot less thinking.
Maybe you should stop buying Belville sets then?
Seriously, I've been able to build things of increasing sophistication lately thanks to newer Lego pieces. There are small Technic pieces that didn't exist ten years ago along with new joints and other bits that let Lego freaks like me build very small to very large-scale mecha-type things that simply wouldn't have been possible before. Surf through Brickshelf sometime, and then come back and try to push your notions around.
If you can't find a different use for those "HUGE" custom pieces, well then I'd have to say you simply lack the imagination to do so.
Maybe if there were actually content online, I'd pay for it. In the meantime, if you're going to run a public server from which I can download things for free (from a you-charging-for-it perspective), don't be surprised if we happen to not give a shit about your new subscription services (insert sound of Salon swishing around the edge of the toilet bowl).
Also please explain the voodoo Slashdot logic in your example that went into the idea that since Jack was willing to pay $10 for a chunk of information that was priced at $5, that suddenly he decides not to buy it.
You don't prevent cheating by hiding the tools. All you do is leave it to a few clique-like groups to exploit. This was a hard-learned lesson from the original quakeworld teamfortress mod. I know that's not a solution, but network 3d gaming as we know it has long had its fate etched in stone on this matter. Its days are numbered.
There is no such thing as "cheat proof" code. Punkbuster is not a solution, it's a plug in the dike. In a perfect world with sub-100 pings to every spot on earth everywhere at all times, you could get away with some of these 'protection' schemes. The whole idea of sending hidden information is a basic tenet of network play on a network that involves significant amounts of latency.
If someone doesn't write the new drivers themselves, then someone other than Asus will, although it's a bit too late anyway. There's nothing to stop someone from also snooping their own network traffic and using that to reconstruct "hidden" views on another machine. There are also quite effective and useful aimbots in existence as well, and combined with a gamma hack and some sort of extra information hack like the Asus drivers, and a player can easily become invincible.
Having aimbot detectors is not a solution. I know people who have godlike aim. (I'm definitely not one of them.) They do not need to cheat. These people exist, despite all the whining and crying that follows them wherever they go. I've seen them in real life playing on other peoples' machines that could not have been comprimised into cheat boxes. Aimbot detectors are like Punkbuster, a complete waste of time and will crank out false positives.
A real solution, that few people like to hear, is an active and responsive programming team that maintains the game code (even after the initial release), and an active and responsive server administration on the servers that are out there. Cheaters only get away with what they're doing when there's nobody around to stop them. Problem is, nobody likes to have to babysit a server. The worst places I've been are where nobody can get an admin to deal with cheaters and jerks, or where the admins simply don't care.
If P2P is synonymous with piracy, why do I keep getting glossy brouchures for expensive conferences for the "P2P Revolution" that are sponsored by companies such as Intel, Microsoft and ActiveState? I guess those companies are now pirates as well.
Myst was never, ever a game. It was a pretty picture slide show masquerading as a puzzle. Just because people have been lumping the words game and puzzle together for years does not mean the two are similies now.
A true game allows one to redefine the rules and change the game into something new. A puzzle will always be the same thing. One may assemble it in an infinitude of ways, but the end is always the same (or the same set of endings, as in Myst). Myst was even more restrictive than an average puzzle - there were a few "story arcs", but that was it.
Quake, specifically Quakeworld, was a game far more true than Myst could ever hope to be. QW allowed people to create their own games and their own worlds. The article on Gamespot is slightly accurate - there were at one point more people playing mods such as TF, RA and CTF than regular DM, and that point was reached relatively early in Quake/QW's lifespan. It was the mods themselves that kept QW alive and kicking for so long. Players of Myst, on the other hand, didn't have much else to do once completing the thing except sit around and wait for the sequel.
So-called "adventure" gamers by now will have sniffed and snorted that stupid Quake players know nothing of "story" and "atmosphere". These people regularly fail to realize that QW players were in the process of making their own stories and their own worlds. I've got 2.5 years of my own stories from playing Team Fortress, all of which were far more interesting than any "adventure" game I have yet to see.
At any rate, Myst is a great puzzle, but don't try to tell me that it's a game.
----
If you force the television networks to compete with the internet, you are going to create a competitive market that results in less money to support the games.
Oh no! You mean subject the Olympics to the forces of unbridled capitalism instead of running them under the current system of corporate ogliarchy and corrupt government cronyism? THE HORROR, THE HORR-oh, wait, they already are subjected to the forces of "unbridled capitalism". Silly me, here I was thinking about that pesky "free market" garbage again..
For some time I've been considering building an upright cabinet for more modern games such as Quake 3, Midtown Madness, and Call to Power. The primary difficulty is finding a good interface to the games as they all seem to require many more control inputs these days than the standard 8-way stick and 6 fire buttons offered by the newest jamma cabinets.
At least for the shooters like Q3A and such you might want to check out the arcade War: Final Assault, a networked first-person shooter from Atari. It has five buttons (forward,backward,L & R strafe, jump) and a joystick with a trigger for firing and a thumb button for discarding whatever weapon you have at the time. Granted, you can only hold one extra gun (besides your default one which cannot be dropped and has infinite ammo) and the joystick doesn't allow for quick movements, but if all your cabinets had joysticks everyone would be under the same restrictions.
I don't know why you would ever want to play Call to Power in a cabinet, it's a sit-around-and-think sort of game. Besides, compared to old Civ2 it still stunk..
Oh boo hoo, so we all use junkbuster and nobody's idiot banner ads get through. OMFG, it's the collapse of the NEW ECONOMY!$#@! Nobody will be able to make money now that I'm not seeing yet another banner ad for Britney Spears' latest video or PUNCH THE MONKEY AND WIN $20 (just to name two typical pillars of web commmerce).
I am not required to help anyone's web page make money by looking at their banner ads or clicking on them. If they don't like that, they can institute a user login/password scheme of some type. Not helping someone make money != stealing. I am downloading their content across my connection on my money and my time. They set up a server and opened it to the world, so arguing that they deserve some sort of compensation is rather moot. Companies that embrace this business model should know what they're getting into.
I'd like to see a site that is actually making money off banner ads and isn't a porn/warez site.
It's broken. Well, at the very least it's probably 'IE4.0 Compliant'.
Windows is not defined.
How apropos.
Using my leet hax0r skills, I clicked on View/Page Source in Netscape and found this line:
Windows.style.display = "";
followed shortly thereafter by this one:
(openbracket)DIV id=Windows noWrap
Oops! Forgot that closing bracket there... doncha hate that? (For all practical matters, this page is likely broken in IE4 anyway. I wouldn't know, since I don't have it on hand to use.)
Anyway, after going to their "ground rules page" and reading the warning against using skript kiddie tactics (in page source again), I stumbled across a few particular lines.
"Instead, find the interesting "magic bullet" that will bring the machine down."
What, let the server run all by itself for +45 days?
"There are hidden messages sprinkled around the computer. See if you can find them."
"BILL IS GOD", "DOJ SMELLS FUNNY", "3R33T HaX0RZ UZE W1N98!$#@!@!!!!111"
Actually, does that broken DIV thing back there count as one of the hidden messages? Am I an 31337 H4X0R now?
(Come to think of it, would microsoft ever admit to having the thing broken if someone actually did? Either way, they get free network security testing done or get bragging rights for whatever marketing campaign they have planned for this. Frankly, even if I knew how to go about 'cracking' a server, I'd be more concerned with my own. Microsoft is not lacking in cash reserves, let them do their own testing...)
This is lovely. Too bad there wasn't an article there after all that lavicious worship of Lucasarts lawyers. Pirates of the stripe that take in cameras to movies and then sell the tapes are less than ethical, but lawyers will always be somewhere down there with them.
Choice quotes from the article:
"The lawyers actually got organized back in April. They started out by warning some 700 Internet Service Providers they would be held responsible for anyone offering bootleg copies on their services."
In other words, in a typical corporate lawyer maneuver, they threatened and hassled a good number of people/ISPs who probably never engaged in piracy of SW:TPM or presented resistance to Lucasarts, now or later.
"But these were no ordinary lawyers. They had a second whole computer system ready to press their case."
This doesn't make a shred of sense. Perhaps she meant they had another IP to come in from? (Probably just something caught up in techie-jargon-to-journalist translation.)
"In the end, some 300 Internet Web sites were shut down and hundreds more individuals withdrew their offers to sell stolen copies. All in all, it was a great success."
Until site #301 opened up somewhere in a former Eastern Bloc nation for free (this is a possible EXAMPLE). Of course it was a great success - one doesn't tell one's clients otherwise, epsecially if they happend to be a one Mr. Lucas. This is just a publicity statement.
"Why not have a `Cyber Patrol` which is constantly vigilant, watching the World Wide Web?"
Of course. Those of us who are law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide, right? *shudder*
"So, the next time someone tells you -- `You just can't stop information from being passed around the Internet!` -- think twice. We can stop most of it with a little determination."
Pirates get what they deserve, especially if they sell their stolen wares, but that line gives me the creeps. How would we like it if that quote came from Louis Freeh, let alone some corporate lawyer?
Again, it appears mainstream press and corporate lawyers do not understand the concept of information: once it's out, it's out, regardless of legality or origin. (Or regardless of accuracy for that matter...)
>Several of the (few) posts at this point make the following argument -- "I play violent video games, and I've never killed anyone, so that >theory must be wrong!" This is a fundamental logical flaw.
Perhaps. What most of us are likely saying to ourselves is "I play violent video games and do not sumbit to murderous urges, so I have quite a bit of doubt about claims that such games incite people to violence." Nothing logically flawed there.
>Now, to claim that there is a relationship. [clip clip] >I was recently playing Quake Team Fortress the other day. As I entered the game, I was greeted with the message "Kill, Kill, Kill!"
Welcome to TeamFortress. No space. "Kill, Kill, Kill!" is the spawn message in Well6, which has been around for quite some time. What did you expect by joining a TF game? Hugs and kisses? It's based on Quake, which is mostly about killing virtual others as quickly and often as possible.
>When they are faced with messages like the one I >mentioned above, well, I don't think it causes them to become killers, but I don't think it's healthy, either.
Again, if it disturbs you then don't play it. I've seen that message more times than you will ever start up Quake in your life, and the most it ever meant to me was "fragged again".
>Certainly it's easy to just claim that >portrayed violence is the sole cause, which isn't fair, but isn't it slightly ludicrous to claim that it has no effect whatsoever?
You claim a relationship between portrayed violence and actual violence based on your discomfort with a game you chose to play, amongst other things that may bother you as well. I don't get your point at all.
If someone is bent enough that a video game, TV, the Internet, or even a gun pushes them to violence in any way, they were in desperate need of mental help in the first place. I don't see how toning down violence in various media would have prevented this horrific disaster.
It takes more than exposure to violent images and concepts to create a monster. Turning out a truly twisted and warped human being capable of such slaughter requires years and years of neglect, abuse, hatred, anger and of course, a growing young soul. Those first four ingredients need not come from a parent. It can come from anyone. The violent media in this case was being used as a substitue for actual communication that might have somehow prevented this massacre.
Slashdot Mirror
Try to get it right next time:
"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80's
Thompson never wrote the "There's also a negative side" bit either.
Here's another quote to keep in mind:
"I don't know the percentage of the Internet that's valid, do you? Jesus, it's scary."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, Atlantic Monthly interview, Aug. 26, 1997
Actually that is Minnesota where the guy is fed into a woodchipper, somewhere around the Bemidji/Brainerd area.
I mean, come on, that scene is set in a place with more than one tree. We don't have that luxury in North Dakota.
Ok, so they obfuscate the code by changing names around to gibberish, or in other words they're trying to impose a crude encryption on the code and then release it.
function blah();
gets transmuted into
function xglw()
and so forth, or so I assume. Even if you did bother to obfuscate all the brackets and other syntactical sugar, it would take simple cryptanalysis to bring the code back to readable status. How hard is it going to be to figure out that function xglw does certain things after you see it called from various places?
Your lawyer and your boss are idiots for the same reason various classmates were idiots back in college for trying to hand in other peoples' code with simple substitution performed on function and variable names. It's going to be a shock to your bosses when they find out they can't pull the same shit on the rest of the world that they did on their college professors.
..but a good way to whip a commercial provider into getting their shit together and actually carrying out the "provider" part. I come from a small town in the middle of nowhere that received cable from a company mostly interested in collecting bills and not providing much. Being in the sticks, it was the only company around for cable. So, the city council decides to build their own network using their own dish and equipment. Lo and behold, the outside company suddenly started offering great prices and service. Channels like HBO stopped cutting out intermittently. Complaints were answered.
Needless to say, a vast majority of the town signed on to the municipal network anyway, which has worked quite well to this day.
Nowadays, Lego comes in HUGE custom pieces. The sheer number of blocks you get in a Lego set these days is tiny compared to when I was 10. It involves a lot less thinking.
Maybe you should stop buying Belville sets then?
Seriously, I've been able to build things of increasing sophistication lately thanks to newer Lego pieces. There are small Technic pieces that didn't exist ten years ago along with new joints and other bits that let Lego freaks like me build very small to very large-scale mecha-type things that simply wouldn't have been possible before. Surf through Brickshelf sometime, and then come back and try to push your notions around.
If you can't find a different use for those "HUGE" custom pieces, well then I'd have to say you simply lack the imagination to do so.
Maybe if there were actually content online, I'd pay for it. In the meantime, if you're going to run a public server from which I can download things for free (from a you-charging-for-it perspective), don't be surprised if we happen to not give a shit about your new subscription services (insert sound of Salon swishing around the edge of the toilet bowl).
Also please explain the voodoo Slashdot logic in your example that went into the idea that since Jack was willing to pay $10 for a chunk of information that was priced at $5, that suddenly he decides not to buy it.
You don't prevent cheating by hiding the tools. All you do is leave it to a few clique-like groups to exploit. This was a hard-learned lesson from the original quakeworld teamfortress mod. I know that's not a solution, but network 3d gaming as we know it has long had its fate etched in stone on this matter. Its days are numbered.
There is no such thing as "cheat proof" code. Punkbuster is not a solution, it's a plug in the dike. In a perfect world with sub-100 pings to every spot on earth everywhere at all times, you could get away with some of these 'protection' schemes. The whole idea of sending hidden information is a basic tenet of network play on a network that involves significant amounts of latency.
If someone doesn't write the new drivers themselves, then someone other than Asus will, although it's a bit too late anyway. There's nothing to stop someone from also snooping their own network traffic and using that to reconstruct "hidden" views on another machine. There are also quite effective and useful aimbots in existence as well, and combined with a gamma hack and some sort of extra information hack like the Asus drivers, and a player can easily become invincible.
Having aimbot detectors is not a solution. I know people who have godlike aim. (I'm definitely not one of them.) They do not need to cheat. These people exist, despite all the whining and crying that follows them wherever they go. I've seen them in real life playing on other peoples' machines that could not have been comprimised into cheat boxes. Aimbot detectors are like Punkbuster, a complete waste of time and will crank out false positives.
A real solution, that few people like to hear, is an active and responsive programming team that maintains the game code (even after the initial release), and an active and responsive server administration on the servers that are out there. Cheaters only get away with what they're doing when there's nobody around to stop them. Problem is, nobody likes to have to babysit a server. The worst places I've been are where nobody can get an admin to deal with cheaters and jerks, or where the admins simply don't care.
If P2P is synonymous with piracy, why do I keep getting glossy brouchures for expensive conferences for the "P2P Revolution" that are sponsored by companies such as Intel, Microsoft and ActiveState? I guess those companies are now pirates as well.
Myst was never, ever a game. It was a pretty picture slide show masquerading as a puzzle. Just because people have been lumping the words game and puzzle together for years does not mean the two are similies now.
A true game allows one to redefine the rules and change the game into something new. A puzzle will always be the same thing. One may assemble it in an infinitude of ways, but the end is always the same (or the same set of endings, as in Myst). Myst was even more restrictive than an average puzzle - there were a few "story arcs", but that was it.
Quake, specifically Quakeworld, was a game far more true than Myst could ever hope to be. QW allowed people to create their own games and their own worlds. The article on Gamespot is slightly accurate - there were at one point more people playing mods such as TF, RA and CTF than regular DM, and that point was reached relatively early in Quake/QW's lifespan. It was the mods themselves that kept QW alive and kicking for so long. Players of Myst, on the other hand, didn't have much else to do once completing the thing except sit around and wait for the sequel.
So-called "adventure" gamers by now will have sniffed and snorted that stupid Quake players know nothing of "story" and "atmosphere". These people regularly fail to realize that QW players were in the process of making their own stories and their own worlds. I've got 2.5 years of my own stories from playing Team Fortress, all of which were far more interesting than any "adventure" game I have yet to see.
At any rate, Myst is a great puzzle, but don't try to tell me that it's a game.
----
If you force the television networks to compete with the internet, you are going to create a competitive market that results in less money to support the games.
Oh no! You mean subject the Olympics to the forces of unbridled capitalism instead of running them under the current system of corporate ogliarchy and corrupt government cronyism? THE HORROR, THE HORR-oh, wait, they already are subjected to the forces of "unbridled capitalism". Silly me, here I was thinking about that pesky "free market" garbage again..
biya
--------
For some time I've been considering building an upright cabinet for more modern games such as Quake 3, Midtown Madness, and Call to Power. The primary difficulty is finding a good interface to the games as they all seem to require many more control inputs these days than the standard 8-way stick and 6 fire buttons offered by the newest jamma cabinets.
At least for the shooters like Q3A and such you might want to check out the arcade War: Final Assault, a networked first-person shooter from Atari. It has five buttons (forward,backward,L & R strafe, jump) and a joystick with a trigger for firing and a thumb button for discarding whatever weapon you have at the time. Granted, you can only hold one extra gun (besides your default one which cannot be dropped and has infinite ammo) and the joystick doesn't allow for quick movements, but if all your cabinets had joysticks everyone would be under the same restrictions.
I don't know why you would ever want to play Call to Power in a cabinet, it's a sit-around-and-think sort of game. Besides, compared to old Civ2 it still stunk..
biya
--------
Oh boo hoo, so we all use junkbuster and nobody's idiot banner ads get through. OMFG, it's the collapse of the NEW ECONOMY!$#@! Nobody will be able to make money now that I'm not seeing yet another banner ad for Britney Spears' latest video or PUNCH THE MONKEY AND WIN $20 (just to name two typical pillars of web commmerce).
I am not required to help anyone's web page make money by looking at their banner ads or clicking on them. If they don't like that, they can institute a user login/password scheme of some type. Not helping someone make money != stealing. I am downloading their content across my connection on my money and my time. They set up a server and opened it to the world, so arguing that they deserve some sort of compensation is rather moot. Companies that embrace this business model should know what they're getting into.
I'd like to see a site that is actually making money off banner ads and isn't a porn/warez site.
It's broken. Well, at the very least it's probably 'IE4.0 Compliant'.
How apropos.
Using my leet hax0r skills, I clicked on View/Page Source in Netscape and found this line:
followed shortly thereafter by this one:
Oops! Forgot that closing bracket there... doncha hate that? (For all practical matters, this page is likely broken in IE4 anyway. I wouldn't know, since I don't have it on hand to use.)
Anyway, after going to their "ground rules page" and reading the warning against using skript kiddie tactics (in page source again), I stumbled across a few particular lines.
What, let the server run all by itself for +45 days?
"BILL IS GOD", "DOJ SMELLS FUNNY", "3R33T HaX0RZ UZE W1N98!$#@!@!!!!111"
Actually, does that broken DIV thing back there count as one of the hidden messages? Am I an 31337 H4X0R now?
(Come to think of it, would microsoft ever admit to having the thing broken if someone actually did? Either way, they get free network security testing done or get bragging rights for whatever marketing campaign they have planned for this. Frankly, even if I knew how to go about 'cracking' a server, I'd be more concerned with my own. Microsoft is not lacking in cash reserves, let them do their own testing...)
---
This is lovely. Too bad there wasn't an article there after all that lavicious worship of Lucasarts lawyers. Pirates of the stripe that take in cameras to movies and then sell the tapes are less than ethical, but lawyers will always be somewhere down there with them.
Choice quotes from the article:
"The lawyers actually got organized back in April. They started out by warning some 700 Internet Service Providers they would be held responsible for anyone offering bootleg copies on their services."
In other words, in a typical corporate lawyer maneuver, they threatened and hassled a good number of people/ISPs who probably never engaged in piracy of SW:TPM or presented resistance to Lucasarts, now or later.
"But these were no ordinary lawyers. They had a second whole computer system ready to press their case."
This doesn't make a shred of sense. Perhaps she meant they had another IP to come in from? (Probably just something caught up in techie-jargon-to-journalist translation.)
"In the end, some 300 Internet Web sites were shut down and hundreds more individuals withdrew their offers to sell stolen copies. All in all, it was a great success."
Until site #301 opened up somewhere in a former Eastern Bloc nation for free (this is a possible EXAMPLE). Of course it was a great success - one doesn't tell one's clients otherwise, epsecially if they happend to be a one Mr. Lucas. This is just a publicity statement.
"Why not have a `Cyber Patrol` which is constantly vigilant, watching the World Wide Web?"
Of course. Those of us who are law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide, right? *shudder*
"So, the next time someone tells you -- `You just can't stop information from being passed around the Internet!` -- think twice. We can stop most of it with a little determination."
Pirates get what they deserve, especially if they sell their stolen wares, but that line gives me the creeps. How would we like it if that quote came from Louis Freeh, let alone some corporate lawyer?
Again, it appears mainstream press and corporate lawyers do not understand the concept of information: once it's out, it's out, regardless of legality or origin. (Or regardless of accuracy for that matter...)
>Several of the (few) posts at this point make the following argument -- "I play violent video games, and I've never killed anyone, so that >theory must be wrong!" This is a fundamental logical flaw.
Perhaps. What most of us are likely saying to ourselves is "I play violent video games and do not sumbit to murderous urges, so I have quite a bit of doubt about claims that such games incite people to violence." Nothing logically flawed there.
>Now, to claim that there is a relationship.
[clip clip]
>I was recently playing Quake Team Fortress the other day. As I entered the game, I was greeted with the message "Kill, Kill, Kill!"
Welcome to TeamFortress. No space. "Kill, Kill, Kill!" is the spawn message in Well6, which has been around for quite some time. What did you expect by joining a TF game? Hugs and kisses? It's based on Quake, which is mostly about killing virtual others as quickly and often as possible.
>When they are faced with messages like the one I
>mentioned above, well, I don't think it causes them to become killers, but I don't think it's healthy, either.
Again, if it disturbs you then don't play it. I've seen that message more times than you will ever start up Quake in your life, and the most it ever meant to me was "fragged again".
>Certainly it's easy to just claim that
>portrayed violence is the sole cause, which isn't fair, but isn't it slightly ludicrous to claim that it has no effect whatsoever?
You claim a relationship between portrayed violence and actual violence based on your discomfort with a game you chose to play, amongst other things that may bother you as well. I don't get your point at all.
If someone is bent enough that a video game, TV, the Internet, or even a gun pushes them to violence in any way, they were in desperate need of mental help in the first place. I don't see how toning down violence in various media would have prevented this horrific disaster.
It takes more than exposure to violent images and concepts to create a monster. Turning out a truly twisted and warped human being capable of such slaughter requires years and years of neglect, abuse, hatred, anger and of course, a growing young soul. Those first four ingredients need not come from a parent. It can come from anyone. The violent media in this case was being used as a substitue for actual communication that might have somehow prevented this massacre.
"Goth", last I checked, is Latin for "loser".