The Dragonlance Chronicles (the first DL trilogy) I recently revisited, and it held up better than I thought it would. I've also re-read David Eddings (which did all right in a re-reading), the White Mountain series, and many other books I read 10 or 20 years ago. Ironically, the LOTR trilogy held up the worst.
I now think Dragonlance Chronicles is a better trilogy than Tolkien, who came from the Charles Dickens school of writing. Especially after watching the movies, which put the books in a new light, I have finally come to realize the entire plot doesn't make the slightest scrap of sense. The writing is also overwraught, with Tolkein much too fascinated with his background mythology to realize too much of this detracts from the story. Robert Jordan handled it much better in his early works - you'd see a giant hand sticking out of the ground somewhere, the characters would comment on it, and move on. For all that, his world also doesn't make any sense. The elves are leaving because humans are taking over the world? Where? There's no evidence of this. There's Bree in the north, and a couple small nations to the south (I doubt the Haradrim all the way in the southern hemisphere were really bothering them).
And Tolkien only can resolve conflicts via Deus Ex Machina: Helm's Deep? Gandalf blinds them all, and the Ents eat them. Isengard? Ents destroy it. Frodo's about to get blown up by a volcano going off? Birds come out of nowhere and pick him up. Battle of Pelenor Fields? A big unkillable undead army shows up and hand-waves the final combat.
>>Indeed, along with Brave New World, just to get the other side of the dystopia spectrum covered.
Why stop there? Also read Bellamy's Looking Backward, which was written in the late 1800s about a far futuristic society (the Year 2000!) Unlike BNW or 1984, it was generally positive. Why is it sci-fi? Even from that far remove, he was able to accurately predict a lot of our advancements, like being able to listen to music in your house remotely, without needing someone live playing it for you, the culture of going out to eat, women's rights, and a lot of other things.
He did get wrong the communism and changes in money.
Just as fascinating to look back on now as it is to read it from the POV of a person reading it when it was published in 1888.
Heinlein wrote as a survivor of WWII. But it is arguable that the conflicts we (as in USA) have inserted ourselves in since then have been to our (national) benefit and not uncommonly as an imperialist/colonialist. This is where the moral philosophy of his fails. Nothing the US military has done since WWII is in any way commensurate with an alien invasion that could destroy all humanity. Hell, not even an illegal alien invasion.
Which is why he *also* proposed that the electorate would have ultimate control over if it wanted to go to war. With the caveat that if the measure passed, anyone who voted for it would have to report to a recruiter the next day and volunteer.
>>The philosophy Starship Troopers is so easy to destroy the average middle schooler could do it.
How so? Even today it presents a fascinating alternative to the current system of voting we use. Of course, there's no way it would be implemented (universal franchise is a cornerstone of modern democracy), but it is interesting (even mind-expanding) to think about.
Also, as my wife mentioned to me the other day, she would really have loved to have taken a class like that. We don't even have Civics classes in most high schools these days (it's not one of the A-E requirements for entry to college, so it gets scrapped). I'd personally love to see a semester Civics and Philosophy made mandatory in high schools, along with a semester of econ, but it's not English Language Arts (ironically enough) or Math, so it'll never happen given the constraints of NCLB.
And if you think the argument is "so easy to destroy", consider the Roman Republic, and how its concept of civic duty meant that every citizen would voluntarily leave the farm and join the legions, no matter what. No matter that the previous three armies had been annihilated by Hannibal, and some cities had no eligible men left. The men still left their farms and formed yet another army to defeat the invader.
Contrast that with our pussified culture today, and how even our volunteer armed men and women are mocked as baby killers, and how even 10 men killed in battle yesterday made the front page of the Drudge Report. There is something to be said for Heinlein's idea in Starship Troopers (though, as mentioned in Expanded Universe, it was an idea, not a serious suggestion)... sacrifice, civic duty, and freedom have always been linked together.
>>Microsoft takes backwards compatibility very seriously.
They always say this, and then fairly fundamental programs always seem to break during one of their OS upgrades. Like my very expensive copy of MATLAB. Won't run on Vista. Period. And the code we've licensed won't run on more modern versions of MATLAB. And it's impossible to find high end visualization laptops these days with XP on them.
Also Amazon will eat a review if it has anything it thinks is a hyperlink in it (similar to the Lameness filter, but it accepts your submission then silently kills it). I've had to redo a few reviews on there because of this silent killer.
The content was essentially the same the second time, so I think they have a hidden filter on submissions...
I sort of doubt the Pre will allow its firmware to be updated by Apple. And it's Palms responsibility to reverse engineer iTunes correctly, not Apple's.
They allow synching the library, but not synching with iTunes.
Palm is spoofing the ID in order to interoperate with iTunes. This is a protected form of engineering. Or, at least, it used to be. The DMCA sort of through those provisions through the shredder.
I remember a time when it was legal to reverse engineer things for compatibility purposes. (Was a long time ago... the 90s, perhaps?)
I lot of people are complaining the Palm thing smacks of fraud, but it is no different than telling Microsoft Word that the document is opening was made by Word instead of Open Office for compatibility reasons.
Also, the argument that Apple needs to break compatibility in order to protect itself is complete bullshit. If my Palm doesn't sync with iTunes, I'm going to bitch about it to Palm. Nobody expects iTunes to work.
>>Now we're about the same, except we're a melting pot of xenophobes (maybe not at the citizen level, but definitely at the administrative/political level.
Citation, please. Both parties love having open borders - Republicans get cheap labor, and Democrats get votes. That's why we still don't have a border fence in San Diego, after 20 years of trying to get one, and a bill actually being passed authorizing it.
There's a difference between trying to control the borders of a country and xenophobia. (And if you think America is particularly bad, consider what happens to you if you try to enter China illegally.) Illegal immigrants crossing the border are a significant problem to people in San Diego. When the fence was partially built, it worked - but since they didn't complete it, it ended up funneling all of the people through my buddy's farm out in Descanso. It is easy for people like you to cry xenophobia, whereas he's really just tired of having the locks broken on his barn and finding 40 people huddled inside.
Or in other words, people tend to be awfully generous with other people's time and money, but if it happened to them, they'd be just as "xenophobic" as the rest.
>>Even if some of the fundamentals are similar, it isn't as simple as it was back in the day.
I disagree. From a game mechanics point of view, MUDs were much more complicated and interesting than the very simple systems used in games like WoW. If all it took to make WoW was art assets - the only thing that is hard to get for free (though successful projects do tend to attract artists to them) - then there'd be a bijillion games as successful as WoW. Art is really not that hard to generate. I've worked with small game studios that had a couple artists on their team, and they were able to produce amazing amounts of high-quality work in relatively short periods of time (as in, they'd often have something production ready to me within an hour or two).
No, the limiting factor on MMORPGs is game mechanics and content. AoC failed due to missing game mechanics and content. EVE is a failure as a solo MMORPG because there isn't very much interesting single player content, but it is very successful as a guild game, since the guilds essentially generate their own content, and CCP just reports on what the users are doing. If AoC had shipped with mod and map making tools, it would have been a runaway success, IMO.
>>Adding content to WoW, Eve, or whatever, would require you to have 3D modeling skills.
Not necessarily. I wrote a reasonably successful mod for Quake, and I don't think I've ever made more than one model for the mod... wait, no. I did modify an existing one, sorta. The mod had a quarter of a million downloads before a modeller volunteered to make some models for it. Till then, I just reused existing stuff in creative ways.
>>you'd have to suspect everyone of ulterior motives no matter what they were creating. "
That sort of reminds me of the NWN grind maps, where the mod would just throw endless waves of easy to kill monsters at you, allowing you to level from 1 to 20 in less than half an hour. Of course, the game allows the DM to arbitrarily assign XP, and there were infinite XP exploits in-game as well, so it's not that broken, compared to something like that in WoW.
Since WoW is essentially a jackpot-based system for loot combined with tokens for incremental awards, you could probably devise some sort of random loot generation system that bases the Ilevel of the rewards based on a variety of factors, but never resulting in the ultimate loot available at any point in time. However, since loot in WoW is incredibly one-dimensional (people in Arenas tend to have carbon copies of each others' gear), random generated loot might be more interesting for a player.
You might even want to give awards for the designers of dungeons for making their dungeons "challenging" (certain percentage of encounters resulting in wipes, but not too high or too low) and for the amount of play it gets. Some sort of moderation system (or a hierarchical system, like I said, where you have player admins moderating other players work) would probably be necessary, and should be possible without too much GM intervention. Like perhaps the top 10 played or rated dungeons each week get reviewed by Blizzard GMs, and when approved, put into the actual game.
Honestly - they could get so much new content out of this kind of stuff, it makes me sad to think about. Well, not that sad. I haven't played WoW much since April 2007.
MUDs showed just how prolific users can be in creating high-quality content. Ok, sure, not all of it was high quality, but they did amazing things back in these online games in the mid-90s that still haven't been replicated in MMORPGs. And since the content was generated by the same people that consume the most content (the hardcore users tended to become the admins), it both satisfied the problem of having an end-game, and made sure that the people tended to have a better understanding of the issues in the game than you see from, say, Blizzard (whose community chats have revealed a rather appalling lack of knowledge about how their game actually works).
The only problem is vetting user-created content, but having a hierarchical admin system similar to what the MUDs used to use could be a reasonably sane solution.
I personally spent many weeks coding stuff for ElendorMUSH - one of the largest Tolkein MUSHes out there (and was where I got this name from). The level of interactivity players had with their environment in my region of the world puts WoW to shame.
>>That was largely a result of post-civil war propaganda. The north had to be painted as morally pristine, so they promoted the pilgrims and whitewashed their failures.
Mmm, except the south controlled textbook purchasing, since the states tending to buy en masse, but the northern states tend to allow individual schools or even teachers to buy textbooks. Hence the southern side tended to be whitewashed when talking about the Civil War.
>>Wasn't there a company promising this exact same technology about ten years ago?
1999?
I was working for a professor in 1994 who was all about holographic storage of data. They could actually get very, very high data densities, but the writing of the things (which was akin to developing a photograph) took too long to be practicable. They were sure that the technology would mature, though. Perhaps it has?
The textbook I read with him was published in the late 80s, IIRC.
>>What we REALLY need to do is ban all contributions except those that come from registered voters. If you're not a voter, you can't donate to a Congresscritter's campaign. That would eliminate bribes from corporations which skew our system.
Yep, except I don't know if it would be constitutional to stop someone from donating if they don't vote. Free Speech isn't contingent upon voting, after all, and donating to campaigns is sometimes considered free speech.
But I definitely agree about eliminating all donations from corporations. Finding a way of mitigating the impact of lobbyists would also help a great deal. They tend to balance out somewhat in industry vs industry conflicts, but when it's corporations vs. the common man, there's no lobbyist for the common man.
Indeed. And Pennsylvania was sort of the anti-Massachusetts. It's always annoying when people categorize the early America experience based solely on the one colony.
However, most of the colonies were in the opposite camp of Pennsylvania on most issues, such as religious freedom, relations with Indians, and self-government.
Your argument about EULAs is perfect. I wish it'd get enshrined in law.
Unfortunately, our congress has little to no interest in representing the rights of the general populace, and our legal system also favors those with unlimited legal budgets over the common man.
Here's a thought. If my engine dies, do my breaks lock up?
Does my steering wheel lock, and my seat belt unbuckle?
I know you were making a rhetorical point, but yeah. This is an EMP weapon, which != engine dying.
In a drive by wire system, or worse, a brake by wire system, the answer to all of the above could yes. Your seatbelts will probably be safe unless you have one of those super cool 80s moving seat belt systems - those could malfunction after an EMP blast.
Re:From the last Slashdot article and FYI:
on
Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
·
· Score: 2, Informative
>>Has that ever really happened anywhere?
Yep, happened to a friend of mine back in February. Guy cut in front of him, slammed on his brakes, and then sued him for a million dollars. Pain and suffering, you know? Plenty of witnesses to the event, but his auto insurance company settled with the guy for 100k or so. He was PISSED at his insurance company for caving in to what was pretty blatantly insurance fraud. He wanted to go to court over it.
>>Then, some aggressive idiot wants to tailgate you, you tap your brake lights to ask him to back off. If he doesn't, you flip a switch under your dashboard and kill his engine
And possibly killing him as well. Having a car die in the middle of a crowded freeway is not a zero-risk event.
I think it's kind of a disproportionate response, don't you?
Personally I'd just like to get one of those scrolling LED text displays mounted to the back of my car. "HEY DUDE, BACK THE FUCK OFF. I'M NOT INTO THAT."
Slashdot Mirror
>>Dragonlance is just drivel.
The Dragonlance Chronicles (the first DL trilogy) I recently revisited, and it held up better than I thought it would. I've also re-read David Eddings (which did all right in a re-reading), the White Mountain series, and many other books I read 10 or 20 years ago. Ironically, the LOTR trilogy held up the worst.
I now think Dragonlance Chronicles is a better trilogy than Tolkien, who came from the Charles Dickens school of writing. Especially after watching the movies, which put the books in a new light, I have finally come to realize the entire plot doesn't make the slightest scrap of sense. The writing is also overwraught, with Tolkein much too fascinated with his background mythology to realize too much of this detracts from the story. Robert Jordan handled it much better in his early works - you'd see a giant hand sticking out of the ground somewhere, the characters would comment on it, and move on. For all that, his world also doesn't make any sense. The elves are leaving because humans are taking over the world? Where? There's no evidence of this. There's Bree in the north, and a couple small nations to the south (I doubt the Haradrim all the way in the southern hemisphere were really bothering them).
And Tolkien only can resolve conflicts via Deus Ex Machina: Helm's Deep? Gandalf blinds them all, and the Ents eat them. Isengard? Ents destroy it. Frodo's about to get blown up by a volcano going off? Birds come out of nowhere and pick him up. Battle of Pelenor Fields? A big unkillable undead army shows up and hand-waves the final combat.
>>Indeed, along with Brave New World, just to get the other side of the dystopia spectrum covered.
Why stop there? Also read Bellamy's Looking Backward, which was written in the late 1800s about a far futuristic society (the Year 2000!) Unlike BNW or 1984, it was generally positive. Why is it sci-fi? Even from that far remove, he was able to accurately predict a lot of our advancements, like being able to listen to music in your house remotely, without needing someone live playing it for you, the culture of going out to eat, women's rights, and a lot of other things.
He did get wrong the communism and changes in money.
Just as fascinating to look back on now as it is to read it from the POV of a person reading it when it was published in 1888.
Which is why he *also* proposed that the electorate would have ultimate control over if it wanted to go to war. With the caveat that if the measure passed, anyone who voted for it would have to report to a recruiter the next day and volunteer.
>>The philosophy Starship Troopers is so easy to destroy the average middle schooler could do it.
How so? Even today it presents a fascinating alternative to the current system of voting we use. Of course, there's no way it would be implemented (universal franchise is a cornerstone of modern democracy), but it is interesting (even mind-expanding) to think about.
Also, as my wife mentioned to me the other day, she would really have loved to have taken a class like that. We don't even have Civics classes in most high schools these days (it's not one of the A-E requirements for entry to college, so it gets scrapped). I'd personally love to see a semester Civics and Philosophy made mandatory in high schools, along with a semester of econ, but it's not English Language Arts (ironically enough) or Math, so it'll never happen given the constraints of NCLB.
And if you think the argument is "so easy to destroy", consider the Roman Republic, and how its concept of civic duty meant that every citizen would voluntarily leave the farm and join the legions, no matter what. No matter that the previous three armies had been annihilated by Hannibal, and some cities had no eligible men left. The men still left their farms and formed yet another army to defeat the invader.
Contrast that with our pussified culture today, and how even our volunteer armed men and women are mocked as baby killers, and how even 10 men killed in battle yesterday made the front page of the Drudge Report. There is something to be said for Heinlein's idea in Starship Troopers (though, as mentioned in Expanded Universe, it was an idea, not a serious suggestion)... sacrifice, civic duty, and freedom have always been linked together.
>>They'd damn well better give you a full refund if that v6 was an essential part of the contract.
From my Terms of Service with Verizon, defining a 'bit': "A unit of information that respresent a single character."
Sigh... both a Tech and Grammar Fail.
I wonder if I can sue them for breach of service if they can't come up with a coding scheme that can pack ASCII into a single bit.
>>Microsoft takes backwards compatibility very seriously.
They always say this, and then fairly fundamental programs always seem to break during one of their OS upgrades. Like my very expensive copy of MATLAB. Won't run on Vista. Period. And the code we've licensed won't run on more modern versions of MATLAB. And it's impossible to find high end visualization laptops these days with XP on them.
And yeah, I am a little bitter about it.
Also Amazon will eat a review if it has anything it thinks is a hyperlink in it (similar to the Lameness filter, but it accepts your submission then silently kills it). I've had to redo a few reviews on there because of this silent killer.
The content was essentially the same the second time, so I think they have a hidden filter on submissions...
I sort of doubt the Pre will allow its firmware to be updated by Apple. And it's Palms responsibility to reverse engineer iTunes correctly, not Apple's.
They allow synching the library, but not synching with iTunes.
Palm is spoofing the ID in order to interoperate with iTunes. This is a protected form of engineering. Or, at least, it used to be. The DMCA sort of through those provisions through the shredder.
I remember a time when it was legal to reverse engineer things for compatibility purposes. (Was a long time ago... the 90s, perhaps?)
I lot of people are complaining the Palm thing smacks of fraud, but it is no different than telling Microsoft Word that the document is opening was made by Word instead of Open Office for compatibility reasons.
Also, the argument that Apple needs to break compatibility in order to protect itself is complete bullshit. If my Palm doesn't sync with iTunes, I'm going to bitch about it to Palm. Nobody expects iTunes to work.
>>...is that the Republicans-and probably more than a few Democrats-are going to blame Obama and his administration for something THEY ruined.
It warms my heart to know that Bush still can be blamed for every single thing that goes wrong in the entire world.
>>Now we're about the same, except we're a melting pot of xenophobes (maybe not at the citizen level, but definitely at the administrative/political level.
Citation, please. Both parties love having open borders - Republicans get cheap labor, and Democrats get votes. That's why we still don't have a border fence in San Diego, after 20 years of trying to get one, and a bill actually being passed authorizing it.
There's a difference between trying to control the borders of a country and xenophobia. (And if you think America is particularly bad, consider what happens to you if you try to enter China illegally.) Illegal immigrants crossing the border are a significant problem to people in San Diego. When the fence was partially built, it worked - but since they didn't complete it, it ended up funneling all of the people through my buddy's farm out in Descanso. It is easy for people like you to cry xenophobia, whereas he's really just tired of having the locks broken on his barn and finding 40 people huddled inside.
Or in other words, people tend to be awfully generous with other people's time and money, but if it happened to them, they'd be just as "xenophobic" as the rest.
>>the weight lifters would all be subject to health and safety legislation, as would the hammer and javelin throwers
I thought the UK banned javelins? Last I heard, the Olympians would have to throw spoons down the field.
>>Even if some of the fundamentals are similar, it isn't as simple as it was back in the day.
I disagree. From a game mechanics point of view, MUDs were much more complicated and interesting than the very simple systems used in games like WoW. If all it took to make WoW was art assets - the only thing that is hard to get for free (though successful projects do tend to attract artists to them) - then there'd be a bijillion games as successful as WoW. Art is really not that hard to generate. I've worked with small game studios that had a couple artists on their team, and they were able to produce amazing amounts of high-quality work in relatively short periods of time (as in, they'd often have something production ready to me within an hour or two).
No, the limiting factor on MMORPGs is game mechanics and content. AoC failed due to missing game mechanics and content. EVE is a failure as a solo MMORPG because there isn't very much interesting single player content, but it is very successful as a guild game, since the guilds essentially generate their own content, and CCP just reports on what the users are doing. If AoC had shipped with mod and map making tools, it would have been a runaway success, IMO.
>>Adding content to WoW, Eve, or whatever, would require you to have 3D modeling skills.
Not necessarily. I wrote a reasonably successful mod for Quake, and I don't think I've ever made more than one model for the mod... wait, no. I did modify an existing one, sorta. The mod had a quarter of a million downloads before a modeller volunteered to make some models for it. Till then, I just reused existing stuff in creative ways.
>>you'd have to suspect everyone of ulterior motives no matter what they were creating. "
That sort of reminds me of the NWN grind maps, where the mod would just throw endless waves of easy to kill monsters at you, allowing you to level from 1 to 20 in less than half an hour. Of course, the game allows the DM to arbitrarily assign XP, and there were infinite XP exploits in-game as well, so it's not that broken, compared to something like that in WoW.
Since WoW is essentially a jackpot-based system for loot combined with tokens for incremental awards, you could probably devise some sort of random loot generation system that bases the Ilevel of the rewards based on a variety of factors, but never resulting in the ultimate loot available at any point in time. However, since loot in WoW is incredibly one-dimensional (people in Arenas tend to have carbon copies of each others' gear), random generated loot might be more interesting for a player.
You might even want to give awards for the designers of dungeons for making their dungeons "challenging" (certain percentage of encounters resulting in wipes, but not too high or too low) and for the amount of play it gets. Some sort of moderation system (or a hierarchical system, like I said, where you have player admins moderating other players work) would probably be necessary, and should be possible without too much GM intervention. Like perhaps the top 10 played or rated dungeons each week get reviewed by Blizzard GMs, and when approved, put into the actual game.
Honestly - they could get so much new content out of this kind of stuff, it makes me sad to think about. Well, not that sad. I haven't played WoW much since April 2007.
MUDs showed just how prolific users can be in creating high-quality content. Ok, sure, not all of it was high quality, but they did amazing things back in these online games in the mid-90s that still haven't been replicated in MMORPGs. And since the content was generated by the same people that consume the most content (the hardcore users tended to become the admins), it both satisfied the problem of having an end-game, and made sure that the people tended to have a better understanding of the issues in the game than you see from, say, Blizzard (whose community chats have revealed a rather appalling lack of knowledge about how their game actually works).
The only problem is vetting user-created content, but having a hierarchical admin system similar to what the MUDs used to use could be a reasonably sane solution.
I personally spent many weeks coding stuff for ElendorMUSH - one of the largest Tolkein MUSHes out there (and was where I got this name from). The level of interactivity players had with their environment in my region of the world puts WoW to shame.
>>That was largely a result of post-civil war propaganda. The north had to be painted as morally pristine, so they promoted the pilgrims and whitewashed their failures.
Mmm, except the south controlled textbook purchasing, since the states tending to buy en masse, but the northern states tend to allow individual schools or even teachers to buy textbooks. Hence the southern side tended to be whitewashed when talking about the Civil War.
>>Wasn't there a company promising this exact same technology about ten years ago?
1999?
I was working for a professor in 1994 who was all about holographic storage of data. They could actually get very, very high data densities, but the writing of the things (which was akin to developing a photograph) took too long to be practicable. They were sure that the technology would mature, though. Perhaps it has?
The textbook I read with him was published in the late 80s, IIRC.
>>"well-designed error correction"? How likely is that?
Very likely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_correction
>>What we REALLY need to do is ban all contributions except those that come from registered voters. If you're not a voter, you can't donate to a Congresscritter's campaign. That would eliminate bribes from corporations which skew our system.
Yep, except I don't know if it would be constitutional to stop someone from donating if they don't vote. Free Speech isn't contingent upon voting, after all, and donating to campaigns is sometimes considered free speech.
But I definitely agree about eliminating all donations from corporations. Finding a way of mitigating the impact of lobbyists would also help a great deal. They tend to balance out somewhat in industry vs industry conflicts, but when it's corporations vs. the common man, there's no lobbyist for the common man.
Indeed. And Pennsylvania was sort of the anti-Massachusetts. It's always annoying when people categorize the early America experience based solely on the one colony.
However, most of the colonies were in the opposite camp of Pennsylvania on most issues, such as religious freedom, relations with Indians, and self-government.
Your argument about EULAs is perfect. I wish it'd get enshrined in law.
Unfortunately, our congress has little to no interest in representing the rights of the general populace, and our legal system also favors those with unlimited legal budgets over the common man.
I know you were making a rhetorical point, but yeah. This is an EMP weapon, which != engine dying.
In a drive by wire system, or worse, a brake by wire system, the answer to all of the above could yes. Your seatbelts will probably be safe unless you have one of those super cool 80s moving seat belt systems - those could malfunction after an EMP blast.
>>Has that ever really happened anywhere?
Yep, happened to a friend of mine back in February. Guy cut in front of him, slammed on his brakes, and then sued him for a million dollars. Pain and suffering, you know? Plenty of witnesses to the event, but his auto insurance company settled with the guy for 100k or so. He was PISSED at his insurance company for caving in to what was pretty blatantly insurance fraud. He wanted to go to court over it.
>>Then, some aggressive idiot wants to tailgate you, you tap your brake lights to ask him to back off. If he doesn't, you flip a switch under your dashboard and kill his engine
And possibly killing him as well. Having a car die in the middle of a crowded freeway is not a zero-risk event.
I think it's kind of a disproportionate response, don't you?
Personally I'd just like to get one of those scrolling LED text displays mounted to the back of my car. "HEY DUDE, BACK THE FUCK OFF. I'M NOT INTO THAT."