But who knew we'd already granted computers rights?!!
Yeah. Because nothing that anyone says using a machine -- say to aid in disseminating their thoughts to many more people than they could talk to in person -- is actual protected speech!
Maybe the reason such acts are frowned upon isn't because everyone else is a prude, but because violence is a hell of a lot less contageous than lust.
I've seen more mobs than I've seen spontaneous orgies or even mass kissing, so I would dispute your claim in the first place, but even if it was true, so what? The common cold is more contagious than either but nowhere near as serious as even one act of violence.
Since when did it become a crime to continue to have sex once you have a child?
It isn't. But it might be to negligently expose your children to porn. Or if not something to go to jail for, something to have child services take them away. (IANAL.)
Also, like very many parents, you might just be hypocritical enough to hope that your kid doesn't end up doing some of the same things you ended up doing. Sometimes it isn't all about crime but just about wanting your kids to be better than someone who spends their nights surfing MidgetFunXXX.ru.
Yeah, but the clauses that say they can change the terms on their whim have repeatedly failed to stand up in court because they are against the law.
Citation, please? It's my understanding that if you do not repudiate the new contract and continue to perform (i.e. pay your bills), the new contract is binding. (IANAL, and contracts was one of my weaker classes anyway.)
I hear you Brother. I installed Office 2007 on a test machine for work. Loaded up Word played around a bit then went to Print... Be damned if I couldn't find the freakin button that WAS NOT ON THE MAIN MENU BY DEFAULT. I mean, what do you do with a document? Type...bold...Print... ? That sealed the deal for me and I have not used it since.
That was one of the biggest problems I had too, and that's almost exactly the workflow I was trying to do. I had a short list in an email that I needed to "pretty up" by doing a little formatting and print on a Windows box in the local campus lab, and I had a devil of a time figuring out how to print the thing. It took me a few guesses to try the stupid MS logo as a button.
Good Lord, I agree wholeheartedly. The ribbon is nigh-incomprehensible to first time users. I just had to use a version of Office with the ribbon for the first time a few weeks ago, and I had a hard time with it.
Now, I don't know what it's like once you're used to it, but it didn't seem like a step forward in intuitiveness compared to the old Office menus. I don't think that I can chock that up just to me getting older and being used to the old ways.
The difference is that when some dies in a NASA mission, it's because of negligence or simple design choices that they were forced to make; either way the people responsible were working to ensure that the victims did not die and failed. When someone dies in the army, it's because someone else is trying to kill you and succeeded at their job. Maybe NASA would expect 50% casualties if there was another agency out to kill their employees too.
War cannot be casualty free like engineering could theoretically be. We try the best we can to make as one-sided as possible, but battle plans have to be made to be able to succeed in spite of possible losses, and soldiers have to be trained not to fall apart when their allies die (or simply lose the ability to communicate). Hence, training to send in people after the first don't report back.
It's amazing that after the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo successes we can't seem to figure out how to make heavy lift rockets.
You mean, like Apollo 1 which killed three former Mercury & Gemini pilots on the launchpad during a training exercise?
This is nearly 40 years after Apollo was canceled. The Saturn rockets were real workhorses yet with all the advances we can't match them. I have to wonder if it's more beaurocracy than technology.
In 40 years, we've lost a lot of the blueprints and records of how the technology was made, and almost all the minds behind the project are dead or retired, having long forgotten the details of a project they worked on 40 years ago. (Try picking back up a project you worked on a mere 10 years ago with much of the documentation missing!)
Truth is most people who don't use keyboard are lazy, whenever I hear someone whine about PC keyboards I think about how crappy they are at games.
Or, you know, we're on the verge of RSI from all the use of a keyboard we use at our jobs, and tapping between two keys repeatedly for "A" & "B" on a controller hurts a lot compared to using a more ergonomic gamepad. It doesn't matter what you set something to if you have to keep jamming it over and over again (and can't just map the button to repeat fire).
There are genres for which the PC keyboard will always be stronger -- those that require a massive variety of command input, such as RTS games.
But for many simple console games, like platformers, will a keyboard ever catch up to the simple elegance of a game controller? I mean, anyone who has played console games on emulators should know that no keyboard mapping is going to feel as comfortable as something like a good old dual-shock controller for quick, repetitive presses of a few buttons. (My knuckle joints kill me after some games on an emulator.)
So why this idea that any one solution is always better? Different games have different control requirements, and different input devices shape different kinds of gameplay. None is "superior" to the other, and you'll never get a keyboard to give you the same kind of game play as a DDR machine or Wii Tennis.
The next international women's day I'll make sure to tell 50 random women that they're excellent drivers. Just to help end these terrible myths once and for all.
That men only give compliments when they're trying to impress a chick, and they're often insincere?
Small-l libertarians have been aware of and opposed the EPA allowing companies to pollute downstream property owners based on grandfathered "regulations" and other nonsense.
And I'd bet dollars to donuts that the solution isn't "fix the hole the EPA's scheme" but "scrap the EPA's authority to regulate entirely."
As far as "predatory" lending, that is people making money deflating our currency and hard-earned dollars courtesy of the Federal Reserve and Uncle Sam. Finance has not been a free market in a long, long time - if ever. The theory that government can fix it is flawed. You should find better examples upon which to harp your nonsense.
Maybe you should study the history of why financial systems are regulated and what kind of economic devastation used to happen before we had the Federal Reserve system. The theory that removing the government from the equation entirely is far more flawed and historically ignorant.
I understand you, the same happens to me. I used to listen to music and read in the car and now that I drive alone (before my parents did the navigation) I have a hard time knowing all the street names. I was thinking about asking a GPS for my birthday, but maybe I'll study a couple of maps and ask something else.
I recommend spending at least a year driving on your own, and going to new places with printed out instructions just to get into the habit of learning how to look for the right road signs, but if you're still bad at navigation (like I am), then do it -- get a GPS.
It was the best birthday present ever for me, a chronically lost driver. I still have my ancient black & white, beeps instead of talks, uses a serial port to sync, Garmin GPS V largely out of sentiment for the thing. It was a surprise gift from some friends, and I keep it around instead of replacing it with a far better model largely out of sentiment.
I didn't read in the car even (made me sick) and I really didn't have an idea of where anything really was until I started driving (unless I could walk or ride my bike there).
Well, same here actually. Even today, I still can't really learn directions easily by riding in someone else's car there unless paying very close attention to memorizing the route. I have to drive it myself.
perhaps I could suggest the ancient and lost art of 'walking' as a means of learning the local landscape...
Umm, yeah... 'Cause that's practical for all your needs when you don't live in a major city and all your relatives, friends, etc. aren't all within a reasonable walking distance with children in tow. Gosh that would've been an awesome way when I was a kid for my family to get to my grandmother's house over 7 miles away on the other side of some slightly scary neighborhoods and across many roads with no sidewalks at all.
Because sometimes, "turn left at Wimbley Ave" isn't very helpful when you don't know which of the next two roads is Wimbley Ave because you can't look for / read the street signs AND keep your eyes on the road. I can think of many, MANY times when only looking at my GPS's map let me know which road I was supposed to turn on in a new and unfamiliar area.
What's destroying local knowledge is the video baby-sitters in the back-seat. When I was a kid we knew what our neighborhood LOOKED like. These days kids just stare at the screen in the headrest in front of them from the time they pull away until they get where they're going. I'll bet half of them couldn't find their way home if you dropped them off two blocks away.
You know, as much as I love a good ragging on TV, and as much as I hate the use of video valium for babysitting, this isn't really a new problem at all. I had to learn a lot of my community from scratch when I learned to drive because I used to read in the car.
But I wouldn't call any parent that got their kids to read a lot a bad one, would you?
Right. Because if you're not black, you're white. There's no such thing as grey or even orange, and there's never been such a thing as a mixed-model economy. You know. Like ours. Either either fiscal anarchy or totalitarian socialism.
Now I suppose you'll tell me that since everyone should ensure that they can defend themselves, they should not create an organization of defense specialists tasked with securing the defense of the society.
Really, government was designed for this sole purpose.
Really, government wasn't originally designed at all. It just happens as soon as someone gains power over another person. The first formal state occurred when someone rounded up enough people to enforce their will over a populace.
I find it funny when libertarians accept the premise of societies banding together for mutual defense against certain overt forms of violence or deceit (e.g. murder and outright fraud) but not against others (e.g. pollution and predatory lending).
People now expect government to do everything for them including protection against their own stupidity.
I see that you're under the delusion that it's possible to not be "stupid" about every important transaction you engage in. Unfortunately, there's simply far, far, far too much information in the real world for any citizen to properly protect themselves in every transaction. You can't know everything, even in transactions where the seller isn't deliberately hiding information from you, and time is not an infinite resource.
This is what government is good for. We need specialists that can drill down and make sure things are safe for those of us who are not experts in an area.
We need financial regulators because the average person can't understand complex financial products. We need people to look into drug safety because the average person is not a doctor and wouldn't even know where to look to protect themselves against complications. We also need food & drug inspectors because people can't inspect factories to see that the products they ingest are safe. We need people to look into whether businesses are protecting customer's privacy because it takes too much effort to research which companies do and don't.
We need experts to watch what we can't. That's not "stupidity." That's simple specialization of society, as advocated by Adam Smith. Information assymmetry is a fact of life, and the only way to tackle it is to put someone in charge of watching over things. Modern society is simply too complex and contradictory for word of mouth to protect against crooked dealers.
And it does nothing if there's more market advantage to screwing the customers than treating them well. This is especially the case in a world where the only method of regulating bad players you will accept is...
It would be quite simple to organize boycotts against products and companies that don't give you adequate information.
No, it's not simple. If it were simple, people would do it all the time, and it would actually be effective.
In practice, the only boycotts that seem to ever reach any critical mass of attention in the public's mind are religious-based protests, such as those against Disneyworld for "Gay Days," and even then a company that's big enough can simply shrug it off (e.g. Disney). I mean, how's that whole "let's all boycott Amazon.com over their one-click patent" thing going? How about boycotting the RIAA? If enough people don't know, don't care, or don't care enough about a cause not to do business with a company, then there's no market disadvantage to acting like a complete jerk.
It's even more laughable of an idea in markets where there are only a handful of competitors that all play the game the same way, such as utility companies.
I remember being at a party with a guy who was telling a bunch of fascinated people stuff about spiders, the big, the fast, etc. This friend comes over and inserts herself, hears the topic - has a "ugh, I *hate* spiders" moment and then when conversation returns to spiders, asks if we didn't hear her and demands we stop... Umm, lots of other conversations going on - pick one. But rather than deal with shrill lady yet again everyone grumbled and let her get her way.
I remember this game where a guy was chatting with a bunch of fascinated people about various things when this person comes over and inserts himself into the group, insisting that he be allowed to PK the villains in the group. When people don't agree to play with him because they don't know / like him, he goes ahead and does it anyway, demanding that the people stop socializing. Umm, lost of other people in the zone who might be willing to PVP, pick one. But rather than be able to stop the jerk, he used a cheap trick to keep getting his way and expressed surprise at everyone's grumbling.
No it's not legal to drive 45 MPH in the "passing lane". In fact it's not even really legal to "drive" in the passing lane.
In your state. Not mine. Man I wish I had picked a different example because people are jumping all over this (making the same mistake *I* did in thinking that the whole US works like their home state) instead of actually paying attention to my points.
And yes, it is the developers who make the laws/rules of the game. Which is just like in the real world, there are people who live by the laws and there are people who totally ignore the laws, and there are those who live by the laws that are socially acceptable to the portion of society they mingle with.
And in the real world, it's perfectly legal to do all kinds of really annoying things. Like get out on a street corner and give a racist rant. Or to stand only 4 inches behind someone. Or to pick your nose and wipe it off on a public bench. Or to whistle showtunes at a funeral.
But almost everyone will get upset with you, and that's the real point of this whole exercise, isn't it? Doctor Griefer here bemoans the "herd-like" mentality of people playing the game, and he claims that only the "laws" of the game matter and not the social customs. But anyone who acts like he did in real life and who hides behind the refuge of saying, "There's no law against that!" would be just as quickly hated and outcast.
Why? Because some rules exist even if they're not written down. Welcome to the human race!
I see nothing wrong with what the professor did. So he's a sociopath. Welcome to the world of geeks and nerds.
I'm not sure whether to be confused by this statement or just to be really, really worried about you.
Yeah, others have pointed out the factual errors, but think about this for a minute man.
No real factual errors per se. As I've pointed out elsewhere, the whole traffic example was 100% true in both of the states I've lived in. I just forgot it wasn't in many other states.
This is THE PVP area in a HEROS VS VILLAINS game. He's playing a hero. He goes in to kill villains. And HE is in the wrong?
As others point out, he wasn't really playing the game the way it was intended. If he was, not only would he have gotten XP for it, but the developers wouldn't have later banned the behavior. He wasn't doing it to play a character "correctly," but to deliberately flout the social norms of the game. Considering that he goes on later to mess with PvE fights after his initial griefing is banned, it's not about being a "hero" by any stretch of the imagination.
The problem is that just because PVP is possible in this area doesn't mean it's accepted by custom. Different games have different PVP cultures. "PVP Everyone" is the old style you used to see in games like UO & EQ which continues to this day in EVE. "PVP Dueling" is the style you see in games like CoH/V and WoW. He went in with the deliberate aim, not to "enjoy the game as it was meant to be played," but to tweak and anger people as part of a sociology experiment.
So, yes, he's in the wrong -- by conscious design.
Slashdot Mirror
But who knew we'd already granted computers rights?!!
Yeah. Because nothing that anyone says using a machine -- say to aid in disseminating their thoughts to many more people than they could talk to in person -- is actual protected speech!
Now report to the reeducation center, citizen.
Maybe the reason such acts are frowned upon isn't because everyone else is a prude, but because violence is a hell of a lot less contageous than lust.
I've seen more mobs than I've seen spontaneous orgies or even mass kissing, so I would dispute your claim in the first place, but even if it was true, so what? The common cold is more contagious than either but nowhere near as serious as even one act of violence.
Since when did it become a crime to continue to have sex once you have a child?
It isn't. But it might be to negligently expose your children to porn. Or if not something to go to jail for, something to have child services take them away. (IANAL.)
Also, like very many parents, you might just be hypocritical enough to hope that your kid doesn't end up doing some of the same things you ended up doing. Sometimes it isn't all about crime but just about wanting your kids to be better than someone who spends their nights surfing MidgetFunXXX.ru.
Company selling test to detect whether this has happened shows off a tech demonstration of why their product is necessary.
Yeah, but the clauses that say they can change the terms on their whim have repeatedly failed to stand up in court because they are against the law.
Citation, please? It's my understanding that if you do not repudiate the new contract and continue to perform (i.e. pay your bills), the new contract is binding. (IANAL, and contracts was one of my weaker classes anyway.)
I hear you Brother. I installed Office 2007 on a test machine for work. Loaded up Word played around a bit then went to Print... Be damned if I couldn't find the freakin button that WAS NOT ON THE MAIN MENU BY DEFAULT. I mean, what do you do with a document? Type...bold...Print... ? That sealed the deal for me and I have not used it since.
That was one of the biggest problems I had too, and that's almost exactly the workflow I was trying to do. I had a short list in an email that I needed to "pretty up" by doing a little formatting and print on a Windows box in the local campus lab, and I had a devil of a time figuring out how to print the thing. It took me a few guesses to try the stupid MS logo as a button.
Good Lord, I agree wholeheartedly. The ribbon is nigh-incomprehensible to first time users. I just had to use a version of Office with the ribbon for the first time a few weeks ago, and I had a hard time with it.
Now, I don't know what it's like once you're used to it, but it didn't seem like a step forward in intuitiveness compared to the old Office menus. I don't think that I can chock that up just to me getting older and being used to the old ways.
Get a group of people together like the /b/ group on 4chan, have them start labeling mundane links with porn terms, and porn links with mundane terms.
how do i search web?
The difference is that when some dies in a NASA mission, it's because of negligence or simple design choices that they were forced to make; either way the people responsible were working to ensure that the victims did not die and failed. When someone dies in the army, it's because someone else is trying to kill you and succeeded at their job. Maybe NASA would expect 50% casualties if there was another agency out to kill their employees too.
War cannot be casualty free like engineering could theoretically be. We try the best we can to make as one-sided as possible, but battle plans have to be made to be able to succeed in spite of possible losses, and soldiers have to be trained not to fall apart when their allies die (or simply lose the ability to communicate). Hence, training to send in people after the first don't report back.
It's amazing that after the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo successes we can't seem to figure out how to make heavy lift rockets.
You mean, like Apollo 1 which killed three former Mercury & Gemini pilots on the launchpad during a training exercise?
This is nearly 40 years after Apollo was canceled. The Saturn rockets were real workhorses yet with all the advances we can't match them. I have to wonder if it's more beaurocracy than technology.
In 40 years, we've lost a lot of the blueprints and records of how the technology was made, and almost all the minds behind the project are dead or retired, having long forgotten the details of a project they worked on 40 years ago. (Try picking back up a project you worked on a mere 10 years ago with much of the documentation missing!)
Actually, I was thinking that now I finally understand why they decided to reuse the name Orion for this rocket concept.
Truth is most people who don't use keyboard are lazy, whenever I hear someone whine about PC keyboards I think about how crappy they are at games.
Or, you know, we're on the verge of RSI from all the use of a keyboard we use at our jobs, and tapping between two keys repeatedly for "A" & "B" on a controller hurts a lot compared to using a more ergonomic gamepad. It doesn't matter what you set something to if you have to keep jamming it over and over again (and can't just map the button to repeat fire).
There are genres for which the PC keyboard will always be stronger -- those that require a massive variety of command input, such as RTS games.
But for many simple console games, like platformers, will a keyboard ever catch up to the simple elegance of a game controller? I mean, anyone who has played console games on emulators should know that no keyboard mapping is going to feel as comfortable as something like a good old dual-shock controller for quick, repetitive presses of a few buttons. (My knuckle joints kill me after some games on an emulator.)
So why this idea that any one solution is always better? Different games have different control requirements, and different input devices shape different kinds of gameplay. None is "superior" to the other, and you'll never get a keyboard to give you the same kind of game play as a DDR machine or Wii Tennis.
So why the e-penis contest?
The next international women's day I'll make sure to tell 50 random women that they're excellent drivers. Just to help end these terrible myths once and for all.
That men only give compliments when they're trying to impress a chick, and they're often insincere?
Small-l libertarians have been aware of and opposed the EPA allowing companies to pollute downstream property owners based on grandfathered "regulations" and other nonsense.
And I'd bet dollars to donuts that the solution isn't "fix the hole the EPA's scheme" but "scrap the EPA's authority to regulate entirely."
As far as "predatory" lending, that is people making money deflating our currency and hard-earned dollars courtesy of the Federal Reserve and Uncle Sam. Finance has not been a free market in a long, long time - if ever. The theory that government can fix it is flawed. You should find better examples upon which to harp your nonsense.
Maybe you should study the history of why financial systems are regulated and what kind of economic devastation used to happen before we had the Federal Reserve system. The theory that removing the government from the equation entirely is far more flawed and historically ignorant.
I understand you, the same happens to me. I used to listen to music and read in the car and now that I drive alone (before my parents did the navigation) I have a hard time knowing all the street names. I was thinking about asking a GPS for my birthday, but maybe I'll study a couple of maps and ask something else.
I recommend spending at least a year driving on your own, and going to new places with printed out instructions just to get into the habit of learning how to look for the right road signs, but if you're still bad at navigation (like I am), then do it -- get a GPS.
It was the best birthday present ever for me, a chronically lost driver. I still have my ancient black & white, beeps instead of talks, uses a serial port to sync, Garmin GPS V largely out of sentiment for the thing. It was a surprise gift from some friends, and I keep it around instead of replacing it with a far better model largely out of sentiment.
I didn't read in the car even (made me sick) and I really didn't have an idea of where anything really was until I started driving (unless I could walk or ride my bike there).
Well, same here actually. Even today, I still can't really learn directions easily by riding in someone else's car there unless paying very close attention to memorizing the route. I have to drive it myself.
perhaps I could suggest the ancient and lost art of 'walking' as a means of learning the local landscape...
Umm, yeah... 'Cause that's practical for all your needs when you don't live in a major city and all your relatives, friends, etc. aren't all within a reasonable walking distance with children in tow. Gosh that would've been an awesome way when I was a kid for my family to get to my grandmother's house over 7 miles away on the other side of some slightly scary neighborhoods and across many roads with no sidewalks at all.
Because sometimes, "turn left at Wimbley Ave" isn't very helpful when you don't know which of the next two roads is Wimbley Ave because you can't look for / read the street signs AND keep your eyes on the road. I can think of many, MANY times when only looking at my GPS's map let me know which road I was supposed to turn on in a new and unfamiliar area.
What's destroying local knowledge is the video baby-sitters in the back-seat. When I was a kid we knew what our neighborhood LOOKED like. These days kids just stare at the screen in the headrest in front of them from the time they pull away until they get where they're going. I'll bet half of them couldn't find their way home if you dropped them off two blocks away.
You know, as much as I love a good ragging on TV, and as much as I hate the use of video valium for babysitting, this isn't really a new problem at all. I had to learn a lot of my community from scratch when I learned to drive because I used to read in the car.
But I wouldn't call any parent that got their kids to read a lot a bad one, would you?
No. Because that leads to a state-run economy.
Right. Because if you're not black, you're white. There's no such thing as grey or even orange, and there's never been such a thing as a mixed-model economy. You know. Like ours. Either either fiscal anarchy or totalitarian socialism.
Now I suppose you'll tell me that since everyone should ensure that they can defend themselves, they should not create an organization of defense specialists tasked with securing the defense of the society.
Really, government was designed for this sole purpose.
Really, government wasn't originally designed at all. It just happens as soon as someone gains power over another person. The first formal state occurred when someone rounded up enough people to enforce their will over a populace.
I find it funny when libertarians accept the premise of societies banding together for mutual defense against certain overt forms of violence or deceit (e.g. murder and outright fraud) but not against others (e.g. pollution and predatory lending).
People now expect government to do everything for them including protection against their own stupidity.
I see that you're under the delusion that it's possible to not be "stupid" about every important transaction you engage in. Unfortunately, there's simply far, far, far too much information in the real world for any citizen to properly protect themselves in every transaction. You can't know everything, even in transactions where the seller isn't deliberately hiding information from you, and time is not an infinite resource.
This is what government is good for. We need specialists that can drill down and make sure things are safe for those of us who are not experts in an area.
We need financial regulators because the average person can't understand complex financial products. We need people to look into drug safety because the average person is not a doctor and wouldn't even know where to look to protect themselves against complications. We also need food & drug inspectors because people can't inspect factories to see that the products they ingest are safe. We need people to look into whether businesses are protecting customer's privacy because it takes too much effort to research which companies do and don't.
We need experts to watch what we can't. That's not "stupidity." That's simple specialization of society, as advocated by Adam Smith. Information assymmetry is a fact of life, and the only way to tackle it is to put someone in charge of watching over things. Modern society is simply too complex and contradictory for word of mouth to protect against crooked dealers.
And it does nothing if there's more market advantage to screwing the customers than treating them well. This is especially the case in a world where the only method of regulating bad players you will accept is...
It would be quite simple to organize boycotts against products and companies that don't give you adequate information.
No, it's not simple. If it were simple, people would do it all the time, and it would actually be effective.
In practice, the only boycotts that seem to ever reach any critical mass of attention in the public's mind are religious-based protests, such as those against Disneyworld for "Gay Days," and even then a company that's big enough can simply shrug it off (e.g. Disney). I mean, how's that whole "let's all boycott Amazon.com over their one-click patent" thing going? How about boycotting the RIAA? If enough people don't know, don't care, or don't care enough about a cause not to do business with a company, then there's no market disadvantage to acting like a complete jerk.
It's even more laughable of an idea in markets where there are only a handful of competitors that all play the game the same way, such as utility companies.
I remember being at a party with a guy who was telling a bunch of fascinated people stuff about spiders, the big, the fast, etc. This friend comes over and inserts herself, hears the topic - has a "ugh, I *hate* spiders" moment and then when conversation returns to spiders, asks if we didn't hear her and demands we stop... Umm, lots of other conversations going on - pick one. But rather than deal with shrill lady yet again everyone grumbled and let her get her way.
I remember this game where a guy was chatting with a bunch of fascinated people about various things when this person comes over and inserts himself into the group, insisting that he be allowed to PK the villains in the group. When people don't agree to play with him because they don't know / like him, he goes ahead and does it anyway, demanding that the people stop socializing. Umm, lost of other people in the zone who might be willing to PVP, pick one. But rather than be able to stop the jerk, he used a cheap trick to keep getting his way and expressed surprise at everyone's grumbling.
No it's not legal to drive 45 MPH in the "passing lane". In fact it's not even really legal to "drive" in the passing lane.
In your state. Not mine. Man I wish I had picked a different example because people are jumping all over this (making the same mistake *I* did in thinking that the whole US works like their home state) instead of actually paying attention to my points.
And yes, it is the developers who make the laws/rules of the game. Which is just like in the real world, there are people who live by the laws and there are people who totally ignore the laws, and there are those who live by the laws that are socially acceptable to the portion of society they mingle with.
And in the real world, it's perfectly legal to do all kinds of really annoying things. Like get out on a street corner and give a racist rant. Or to stand only 4 inches behind someone. Or to pick your nose and wipe it off on a public bench. Or to whistle showtunes at a funeral.
But almost everyone will get upset with you, and that's the real point of this whole exercise, isn't it? Doctor Griefer here bemoans the "herd-like" mentality of people playing the game, and he claims that only the "laws" of the game matter and not the social customs. But anyone who acts like he did in real life and who hides behind the refuge of saying, "There's no law against that!" would be just as quickly hated and outcast.
Why? Because some rules exist even if they're not written down. Welcome to the human race!
I see nothing wrong with what the professor did. So he's a sociopath. Welcome to the world of geeks and nerds.
I'm not sure whether to be confused by this statement or just to be really, really worried about you.
Yeah, others have pointed out the factual errors, but think about this for a minute man.
No real factual errors per se. As I've pointed out elsewhere, the whole traffic example was 100% true in both of the states I've lived in. I just forgot it wasn't in many other states.
This is THE PVP area in a HEROS VS VILLAINS game. He's playing a hero. He goes in to kill villains. And HE is in the wrong?
As others point out, he wasn't really playing the game the way it was intended. If he was, not only would he have gotten XP for it, but the developers wouldn't have later banned the behavior. He wasn't doing it to play a character "correctly," but to deliberately flout the social norms of the game. Considering that he goes on later to mess with PvE fights after his initial griefing is banned, it's not about being a "hero" by any stretch of the imagination.
The problem is that just because PVP is possible in this area doesn't mean it's accepted by custom. Different games have different PVP cultures. "PVP Everyone" is the old style you used to see in games like UO & EQ which continues to this day in EVE. "PVP Dueling" is the style you see in games like CoH/V and WoW. He went in with the deliberate aim, not to "enjoy the game as it was meant to be played," but to tweak and anger people as part of a sociology experiment.
So, yes, he's in the wrong -- by conscious design.