Yeah, but a multi-million dollar settlement in a town of 3000 sucks. A lot.
This is all beside the point, because the town probably has liability insurance, so the only thing that would really happen is the premiums will go up a bit... But even if I were to agree with you (and I do agree about taking voting more seriously), there should be some consequences for the responsible individual as well.
The penalty will be applied to all the taxpayers, each paying a tiny portion
In a small town (Yes, I understand that in this case the population is almost a million people), a settlement like this does *not* result in a "tiny portion" being paid by each resident.
Each resident should be financially responsible for the actions of somebody hired by somebody who was hired by somebody they elected? That's ridiculous. You assert that it's the voters that need to learn a lesson from this, and not the individuals that imprisoned this kid for making a prank phone call (which he didn't even make)?
I read the article... It seems to me that the bigger issue is that they put a kid in jail for a prank phone call. The fact that he didn't actually do it just makes it that much worse, but the fact of the matter is that they put somebody in jail for a prank phone call.
The problem is that the settlement will be paid by the town's taxpayers (IE, the kid's friends parents and neighbors), and the person responsible will get off with, at worst, the loss of her job.
There are 98 titles on that list of adventure games from 1984 to 2000, and 16 from 2001 to present. And I significantly undercounted the pre-2000 number because games with sequels were counted as one. The rate of publication has slowed to significantly less than half.
Adventure games are still marketable. The problem is that they take a lot of effort. Real effort, not the mostly-made-up additional effort that it takes to make a "next generation" game compared to last.... Adventure games are one long special case. Everything has to be scripted. If you do it in 3D, you could write a third-person shooter and you'd be 10% done. Developers prefefer a cash-cow, which is why LucasArts killed their wildly popular adventure gaming division after Escape from Monkey Island and Grim Fandango were finished.
Another idiot who's repeating fanboy talk who has no idea what he's talking about (but thinks he does).
Are you talking about yourself? (This post from Firefox 2 running on Vista Ultimate)
You're being a pedant and taking it to the level of trolling. Obviously, the dialog that asks weather an application is authorized to run another application isn't privlidge escalation, and perhaps not technically UAC doesn't mean that it's not an annoying security popup.
Try firefox (which still works under UAC), then come back and tell me I was right.
You're wrong. Two popups. One from firefox, one from Windows.
Smartass.
Care to name some of that "vast majority", FUD-boy? Most business specific apps have been running in THIS PRECISE ENVIRONMENT under precisely these limitations for over a decade, ever since NT4 Domains were introduced.
Clearly you can read minds and know exactly which apps I run...
The fact of the matter is that applications which install anything that can be considered a driver fail to install. While you may be able to install them manually, most people will never figure that out.
Your comments disagree with the vast majority of the analysis out there. You need to seriously question which of us is the fanboy.
The point is how pointless it is to assume what would have happened if the situation would have been different.
That's ironic given the basis of this thread is that the situation would have been different given stronger gun control laws.
Since I wouldn't be wearing body armor 24/7, I'd probably be dead. It wouldn't really matter what I would rather have had.
The shooter was using a handgun. Unless he hits you in the head, you're probably not dying immediately, you would probably survive given rapid attention, and there is a decent likelihood that the shooter would miss. Almost half of the people this guy shot are still alive. Chances are that if you didn't get hit in the head, you'd have a chance to get a shot or two off.
For you to have any point whatsoever, you would similarly have to make the counter assumption to every line of your ticklist. The trouble is that your counter assumptions are only valid if you make a whole series of assumptions as to what I think a "pro-gun" world would look like. The further issue with that is that in making all of those assumptions (probably before reading any farther in my comment than past that one line) you completely missed my entire point and instead compared me to Charlton Heston.
Perhaps you think we should live in a police state. I'm betting, however, that you don't. If that's the case, you should actually finish reading my initial comment, take back some of the words you put in my mouth, consider the relative likelihood that the "assumption" I made in my hypothetical question to its opposite given sane levels of access control. There is nothing wrong with logical assumptions. Even given the worst case scenario, it would be hard to imagine a case where a few additional guns in the room would have resulted in more people dying.
One last thing to think about, and I'm not making any assumptions as to what your answer will be: If you were in that room, and this killer was shooting at you, would you have rather have had a gun and the training required to use it correctly, or not? Would you have preferred somebody in the room had a firearm and training to use it correctly, or would you have preferred to sit there and take your chances that you wouldn't get hit as the shooter reloaded and continued firing over and over?
I don't necessarily buy into the axiom that there are no atheists in a foxhole, but I'd bet money that there are very, very few.
Not only are SATA drives cheap, but IDE->SATA adapters can be had online for $4. Additionally, using SATA optical drives bypasses the worst offenders of CD based DRM like Starforce.
Regardless, MSI should have put this warning right on the front of the box in large type. People don't look in the fine print for confirmation of what is considered basic functionality.
Right, because there's no way this guy could have killed 30 people without a gun (say, with a bomb, or something)... No way he could have gotten a gun if they were against the law... etc.
How many fewer people in that classroom would have died if one of the students in the room was carrying?
Best to respond to tragedy with a knee-jerk revocation of civil liberties.
The "firearms" cat is out of the bag. You can't undo technology with laws. Readers of this site should know that better than most people.
It's quite the stretch going from me pointing out the inaccuracies of your post, to me being an egotist who's main goal was to advertise how "cool" I am. Who's assuming here? I'd also like to point out that you're the only one of the two of us who has called people who never played MUDs or BBS games 'idiots'. Pot, meet kettle.
The reality is that XBox Live and the introduction of voice communications to mainstream online gaming along with the profiteering of episodic content has, in my opinion, ruined gaming online. It's completely intolerable. It's AOLers getting access to usenet all over again. I don't understand how comparing interactive online entertainment to newer, higher bandwidth interactive online entertainment is comparing Apples to Oranges.
Seriously, if you're going to make the punishment so wildly severe compared to the harm, why stop with a wimpy little lifetime ban on registration?
It's not wildly severe. It's the minimum punishment required to stop the perpetrator from being a nuisance on the internet again. The sentence doesn't need to be any more severe once it is sufficient to eliminate the problem.
When you were playing on a Commodore 64, you didn't even *have* Internet multiplayer. So it seems to me that the fact that the Internet multiplayer feature exists at all makes the game much better than its C-64 equivalent.
Apparently nobody ever introduced you to BBSs.
Some of us have been gaming online since before the internet.
This has, of course, zero impact on how many popups you will encounter AFTER everything is installed and in place.
You're right. You still see hundreds of them. Any time an application runs another application. Like when you open a document from a browser, or insert a CD, or click a link in an e-mail, or...
Maybe this doesn't happen if you use *all* MS software of the latest versions... Either way, it wasn't the dialogs from software installation that made me turn off UAC. They only pop up once.
Even if you fix them, it doesn't solve the problem with incompatibilities. The vast majority of non-mainstream, business specific apps I've attempted to use since I went to Vista don't work. The driver situation is a nightmare too.
The Age of Wonders series has had its ups and downs... I've played it quite a bit (Though there had to be about 8 months of patches before Shadow Magic would even run). It's four years old now though, and there aren't any more sequels or expansions planned...
My wife still plays it at least once a week. I preferred the original. The latest installment started to move towards real-time with the implementation of simultaneous turns, etc...
Leave everything as it is, but once a person or corporation takes advantage of "name tasting", revoke all their domain names, and ban them from registering a domain name for life.
Seriously, there is not a single good thing that can come out of this service beyond lining the pockets of the registrars.
I am meaning to check out Sam & Max now that you don't need to join gamefly to download them... Civ 4 was good, but that was two years ago. One game in two years. Two actually because of HoMM5, but not exactly a ringing endorsement of the genre.
Those aren't the type of turn based strategy I was thinking about though... It's like they took just the combat from the big empire-building turn based strategy games of the past and wrapped them in either RPG or weak plot. Don't get me wrong, I loves Advance Wars and Tactics, but they're not the same. They're like part of a game. Heroes of Might and Magic 5 did come out recently, but it was *terrible*. Ever since Starcraft, all the futuristic straegy-sims have been real-time instead of turn based.
Certain genres are lacking today though. Try and find a good adventure game, or a good turn-based strategy game. 10-15 years ago there were plenty of quality options to choose from, and today there are few, if any. Platformers have also suffered, but to a lesser extent. Enough, though, that re-releases of old Castlevania and Super Mario Brothers games are best sellers *now*.
I can't believe the "scientists" would skip past an obvious sign of climate change and jump straight to cell phones.
I think the cell phone theory is ridiculous too, but the climate change theory seems equally dubious. Bees exist in such a wide range of climates, that mild climate change should have very little effect on them. The GM crops, and africanized bees theories seems more plausible to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but a multi-million dollar settlement in a town of 3000 sucks. A lot.
This is all beside the point, because the town probably has liability insurance, so the only thing that would really happen is the premiums will go up a bit... But even if I were to agree with you (and I do agree about taking voting more seriously), there should be some consequences for the responsible individual as well.
The penalty will be applied to all the taxpayers, each paying a tiny portion
In a small town (Yes, I understand that in this case the population is almost a million people), a settlement like this does *not* result in a "tiny portion" being paid by each resident.
Each resident should be financially responsible for the actions of somebody hired by somebody who was hired by somebody they elected? That's ridiculous. You assert that it's the voters that need to learn a lesson from this, and not the individuals that imprisoned this kid for making a prank phone call (which he didn't even make)?
I read the article... It seems to me that the bigger issue is that they put a kid in jail for a prank phone call. The fact that he didn't actually do it just makes it that much worse, but the fact of the matter is that they put somebody in jail for a prank phone call.
The problem is that the settlement will be paid by the town's taxpayers (IE, the kid's friends parents and neighbors), and the person responsible will get off with, at worst, the loss of her job.
There are 98 titles on that list of adventure games from 1984 to 2000, and 16 from 2001 to present. And I significantly undercounted the pre-2000 number because games with sequels were counted as one. The rate of publication has slowed to significantly less than half.
Adventure games are still marketable. The problem is that they take a lot of effort. Real effort, not the mostly-made-up additional effort that it takes to make a "next generation" game compared to last.... Adventure games are one long special case. Everything has to be scripted. If you do it in 3D, you could write a third-person shooter and you'd be 10% done. Developers prefefer a cash-cow, which is why LucasArts killed their wildly popular adventure gaming division after Escape from Monkey Island and Grim Fandango were finished.
Are you talking about yourself? (This post from Firefox 2 running on Vista Ultimate)
You're being a pedant and taking it to the level of trolling. Obviously, the dialog that asks weather an application is authorized to run another application isn't privlidge escalation, and perhaps not technically UAC doesn't mean that it's not an annoying security popup.
You're wrong. Two popups. One from firefox, one from Windows.
Smartass.
Clearly you can read minds and know exactly which apps I run...
The fact of the matter is that applications which install anything that can be considered a driver fail to install. While you may be able to install them manually, most people will never figure that out.
Your comments disagree with the vast majority of the analysis out there. You need to seriously question which of us is the fanboy.
That's ironic given the basis of this thread is that the situation would have been different given stronger gun control laws.
The shooter was using a handgun. Unless he hits you in the head, you're probably not dying immediately, you would probably survive given rapid attention, and there is a decent likelihood that the shooter would miss. Almost half of the people this guy shot are still alive. Chances are that if you didn't get hit in the head, you'd have a chance to get a shot or two off.
I can be pedantic too.
A person walking into a room in the middle of class with a gun is clearly not a student in that classroom.
For you to have any point whatsoever, you would similarly have to make the counter assumption to every line of your ticklist. The trouble is that your counter assumptions are only valid if you make a whole series of assumptions as to what I think a "pro-gun" world would look like. The further issue with that is that in making all of those assumptions (probably before reading any farther in my comment than past that one line) you completely missed my entire point and instead compared me to Charlton Heston.
Perhaps you think we should live in a police state. I'm betting, however, that you don't. If that's the case, you should actually finish reading my initial comment, take back some of the words you put in my mouth, consider the relative likelihood that the "assumption" I made in my hypothetical question to its opposite given sane levels of access control. There is nothing wrong with logical assumptions. Even given the worst case scenario, it would be hard to imagine a case where a few additional guns in the room would have resulted in more people dying.
One last thing to think about, and I'm not making any assumptions as to what your answer will be: If you were in that room, and this killer was shooting at you, would you have rather have had a gun and the training required to use it correctly, or not? Would you have preferred somebody in the room had a firearm and training to use it correctly, or would you have preferred to sit there and take your chances that you wouldn't get hit as the shooter reloaded and continued firing over and over?
I don't necessarily buy into the axiom that there are no atheists in a foxhole, but I'd bet money that there are very, very few.
You're right. A hypothetical question is an assumption. How could I have been so stupid?
Drop me a line when you're done debating your imaginary opponent.
Try it. Most drivers look more like SCSI than IDE to the system. DRM systems like Starforce don't support SCSI and simply disable themselves.
Not only are SATA drives cheap, but IDE->SATA adapters can be had online for $4. Additionally, using SATA optical drives bypasses the worst offenders of CD based DRM like Starforce.
Regardless, MSI should have put this warning right on the front of the box in large type. People don't look in the fine print for confirmation of what is considered basic functionality.
Right, because there's no way this guy could have killed 30 people without a gun (say, with a bomb, or something)... No way he could have gotten a gun if they were against the law... etc.
How many fewer people in that classroom would have died if one of the students in the room was carrying?
Best to respond to tragedy with a knee-jerk revocation of civil liberties.
The "firearms" cat is out of the bag. You can't undo technology with laws. Readers of this site should know that better than most people.
It's quite the stretch going from me pointing out the inaccuracies of your post, to me being an egotist who's main goal was to advertise how "cool" I am. Who's assuming here? I'd also like to point out that you're the only one of the two of us who has called people who never played MUDs or BBS games 'idiots'. Pot, meet kettle.
The reality is that XBox Live and the introduction of voice communications to mainstream online gaming along with the profiteering of episodic content has, in my opinion, ruined gaming online. It's completely intolerable. It's AOLers getting access to usenet all over again. I don't understand how comparing interactive online entertainment to newer, higher bandwidth interactive online entertainment is comparing Apples to Oranges.
It's not wildly severe. It's the minimum punishment required to stop the perpetrator from being a nuisance on the internet again. The sentence doesn't need to be any more severe once it is sufficient to eliminate the problem.
Apparently nobody ever introduced you to BBSs.
Some of us have been gaming online since before the internet.
You're right. You still see hundreds of them. Any time an application runs another application. Like when you open a document from a browser, or insert a CD, or click a link in an e-mail, or...
Maybe this doesn't happen if you use *all* MS software of the latest versions... Either way, it wasn't the dialogs from software installation that made me turn off UAC. They only pop up once.
Even if you fix them, it doesn't solve the problem with incompatibilities. The vast majority of non-mainstream, business specific apps I've attempted to use since I went to Vista don't work. The driver situation is a nightmare too.
The Age of Wonders series has had its ups and downs... I've played it quite a bit (Though there had to be about 8 months of patches before Shadow Magic would even run). It's four years old now though, and there aren't any more sequels or expansions planned...
My wife still plays it at least once a week. I preferred the original. The latest installment started to move towards real-time with the implementation of simultaneous turns, etc...
I have a novel solution to this problem.
Leave everything as it is, but once a person or corporation takes advantage of "name tasting", revoke all their domain names, and ban them from registering a domain name for life.
Seriously, there is not a single good thing that can come out of this service beyond lining the pockets of the registrars.
Only if you want the new video card to be "Plug and Play"...
Otherwise the driver can live on the system. Even on the system disk.
I hadn't heard of it. Thanks for the link.
I am meaning to check out Sam & Max now that you don't need to join gamefly to download them... Civ 4 was good, but that was two years ago. One game in two years. Two actually because of HoMM5, but not exactly a ringing endorsement of the genre.
That's a good point....
Those aren't the type of turn based strategy I was thinking about though... It's like they took just the combat from the big empire-building turn based strategy games of the past and wrapped them in either RPG or weak plot. Don't get me wrong, I loves Advance Wars and Tactics, but they're not the same. They're like part of a game. Heroes of Might and Magic 5 did come out recently, but it was *terrible*. Ever since Starcraft, all the futuristic straegy-sims have been real-time instead of turn based.
Certain genres are lacking today though. Try and find a good adventure game, or a good turn-based strategy game. 10-15 years ago there were plenty of quality options to choose from, and today there are few, if any. Platformers have also suffered, but to a lesser extent. Enough, though, that re-releases of old Castlevania and Super Mario Brothers games are best sellers *now*.
I think the cell phone theory is ridiculous too, but the climate change theory seems equally dubious. Bees exist in such a wide range of climates, that mild climate change should have very little effect on them. The GM crops, and africanized bees theories seems more plausible to me.