> However, Einstein certainly deserved a Nobel > for one reason or another and another excuse was chosen.
While I agree that awarding the Brownian motion paper was an excuse, proving the existance of atoms logically at a time when the atomic hypothesis of matter was not settled is definitely not chopped liver.
> Clearly then, GOD is at fault for the mugging-at-gunpoint.
Gabriel: Oh Most Holy One. It appears your virtual world of Earth has some unforseen bugs in its design. Evidently two males can position themselves in such a way as to insert the penis of one into the anus of another. This stacks with sexual desire, and suddenly males burn with lust for each other until one's precious seed is spend inside the other's filthy shithole.
God: Me damn it! I told Lucifer that was gonna happen if I planted the deposit stalk and the vagina near the same place as the waste vomitorium. He said it wouldn't happen, but it did! I knew it would. I don't know why I trusted him.
The problem is that it is unethical to use bots when you've agreed not to.
Tractor pulls have categories for different engine sizes, types, and gearings. Then the last pull is "bring what you've got", where anything is allowed. Perhaps some day people will have a server where any kind of bot or client hacking is allowed. But not yet!
> For example, in L2, when you PK, your karma > goes negative and you turn red. (Until your > karma goes to -INT_MAX, at which point it wraps > to INT_MAX, until they fixed that.)
Hehe, I'm holier than Jesus, and got that way thru mass murder.
Actually, the old testament suggests Yaweh may be in the same boat. =O
Anyone remember the old Pax Imperia game? It was a space conquest RTS where the more planets you had, the more powerful your economy, and the faster you could advance your tech and build and research larger and better-loaded ships.
There was a bug once where one of my planets was doing so poorly, the population dropped below zero, and suddenly I had about 400 trillion people on that planet. Suddenly I had enough economic phallus to build about 10 loaded dreadnaughts before they died off of starvation.
Needless to say, the game went well after that point. Sadly, that only ever happened once. (As a programmer, I suspect population, where a negative value is nonsense, had a calculation where a signed int type was involved, and incorrect casting or ignorance of integer promotion rules in intermediate steps masked a possible negative value, which was then assigned to an unsigned final integer, yielding the gigantic positive number.)
> I am assumming the poster is not a programmer. > Programming is a complex task! I don't think > online games will ever be hack proof. It is > more like the real world, an arms race between > the game programmers and the exploiters.
Ironically, there are at least two online games that allow "cheating", but only in the official way! These are Star Wars: Galaxies, where you can get a smuggler to "slice" your weapons to do a lot more damage than Darth wants to allow, and, of course, The Matrix Online, where Matrix-style bending of the rules is built right into the concept. (So much so it doesn't even seem like "cheating", so I think they goofed in this point.)
Of course, neither, and most obnoxiously, especially The Matrix Online, does not allow actual external hacking to their servers for in-game advantage, any more than any other game does.
And Star Wars: Galaxies had the extremely perverse situation once where smugglers could, using an in-game exploit, slice and re-slice the same weapon over and over again, giving it monsterous amounts of damage. Thus they over-cheated the official cheating system! Slicing the weapon was approved, even encouraged, but slicing it too much was a bannable offence!
Actually, guns are highly beatable in fantasy worlds.
Not too many games have the bad guy go down in one shot from a gun. The only game I've seen that did was Kingpin, set on the special "real" mode. This was the only game I've ever played on its hardest mode that I couldn't beat (and I've played Icewind Dale II on Heart of Fury, starting with two scratch level 1 characters.)
Of course, in my defense, the problem was running out of ammo and health, not progression difficulties.
City of Heroes carries this the opposite direction to a ludicrous extent. You can stand there and have someone with a massive gatling gun rain bullets into you from point blank range, and barely have any damage done to you. And I'm not talking warrior types (tanker and scrapper.) A blaster (caster) vs. a green or grey can get hit with bullets and survive.
As far as I know this is nothing like poker. Poker is gambling money or items with real-world value and with that as the purpose.
This is more like people paying to play poker, and the chips were not worth real cash, just pegs on the wall. That some people can trade their peg positions for money completely outside the establishment doesn't make it like for-money poker in any meaningful sense.
So what exactly was the crime? Taking something in the game is allowed -- and a deliberate part of the game mechanics. This is not in and of itself illegal.
Furthermore, that this stuff can be sole on eBay or whatever, and thus has real-world value also does not make it illegal, either, or Lineage would have to immediately disable PvP looting regardless of whether the loot is to be sold in the real world or not, and regardless of whether Lineage officially approves of real-world sales or not.
I also doubt that is the case.
So unless it's illegal to sell in-game items in the real world, a dubious concept (and independent of whether it's a violation of the license agreement) I don't see what could be illegal here.
Now don't get me wrong. I hate this aspect of PvP. I think it ruined Ultima Online. Many are the times I wished people who did this would get a punch in the nose. But that's not the same thing as it being illegal.
Ehh, the people who do this kind of thing might very well have multiple machines and accounts (multi-boxing), with which they can power level whatever types of characters they need. And they study the minimax discussions so they can whip up that wizard who can slaughter a tank, and only a tank, in one shot, which may only be useful in, say, PvP invasion to knock people out of a valuable camp spot.
Hence, throwing their level 50 or whatever it is on Lineage II into a virtual "jail", or even banning that account, is, pardon the expression, virtually meaningless since they can powerlevel up another replacement in a few days.
Normal mortals will whine at the loss of such a high level character, but to them it's a minor irritant and just part of the cost of doing business.
As long as he didn't cheat (which a bot might be, even if it doesn't voilate the game mechanics, unlike setting your Spirit of Wolf speed to 255) then he acquired the items legitimately within the game mechanics and game design.
So if selling in-game items is not illegal, nor obviously "stealing" them, since that activity is possible and part of the game design, then I don't see what they could hold him on.
And using a bot, even if disallowed by the agreement, would be a violation of the agreement, not a crime per se. Violations of contracts are civil things. Even if this was some kind of criminal action (like a Dr. contracting to perform a heart operation, then walking away in the middle of it) what has been "stolen"? Lineage can flip a few bits and recreate the items. They may be too lazy too, or even claim they don't have to because the items were moved from one character to another via legitimate game design means.
Actually MUDs (the precursor to MMORPGs) came up with the concept of jail. Better yet, the more evil you were, the more the reward went up for your capture.
Of course, people then went around being deliberately evil, ran up the bounty, then logged in their good character, and had the good one kill the bad one for the reward.
Eh, I recall my anthropology 101 prof at U-Mich talking about how we were using his book, but he didn't get paid for that -- he only got paid for sales at other schools.
His one claim to fame was some paper likening people travelling to Mecca to people travelling to Disney World. The rich and the poor all travel together blah blah blah.
A more recent incident occured when my wife tried to help my son create a science project of a citrus fruit battery. Complete with a full-sized lightbulb socket and bulb from the hardware store, just like in the drawing!
Can't imagine why the oranges couldn't light it up. They did it just like the drawing!
So those science book guys, ancient or new, are basically not the phenomenal educators they think they are.
I had one of those science books, with the typical electrical motor you can make yourself! Complete with nails in the cork, etc.
It wasn't until 2 years later in Jr. High I figured out why it didn't work. The wires in the drawing were a stylized winding, only looping about 6 times, well spaced, on each nail. Not the tightly packed windings back and forth and back and forth actually needed to get that turd to move, even with the train set transformer cranked to 100!
Did you know, for example, that a man should walk between a woman and the street when walking on the sidewalk, so as to protect her from horses?
Or, similarly, that a man should walk up the stairs after, and down the stairs before, a woman, so as to catch her lest she fall?
And if eating with the Queen, know the silverware is set from the outside, in, in order of expected use. Also, there is a special utensil for eating asparagus, but if that is not present, one may eat it with one's fingers (assuming it does not have sauce on it.)
They didn't even bother mentioning that flossing was rude at the table.
> As far as "just one universe" goes, more > theoretical physicists prefer the many-worlds > interpretation of quantum mechanics than any other.
Although it has been suggested that having the universe split into duodecillions of copies every billionth of a billionth of a nanosecond is probably the greatest imaginable violation of Occam's razor.
Consciousness will be more fully understood than quantum mechanics is today. Indeed, they will turn out to be related, but only in a very vaguely similar manner to most of the 20th century speculations in that vein.
I predict this is the only prediction that will be wrong. Consciousness will have nothing to do with quantum mechanics, except in the trivial aspect that they are both part of real-world physics.
Yes, but presumably Satan has met God personally, while I have not.
I personally see no metaphysical value in believing in God without proof. Why would believing in God without proof have value to God?
Seems strange to me.
It's almost as if...as if...as if religion were pushed into this corner of valuing faith without proof, and now pretends like it was standing there all along.
Slashdot Mirror
> which will allow you to smell and even touch objects in the 3-D space
Let's hope they finish before Nina Hartley reaches the age of 59 1/2.
My favorite, thanks to SNL, are all the biological classifications, not counting Kingdom:
Please
Come
Over
For
Gay
Sex
Much better than Ken Poured Coffe On Fred's Good Shirt...
Shut up, you bozon!
> However, Einstein certainly deserved a Nobel
> for one reason or another and another excuse was chosen.
While I agree that awarding the Brownian motion paper was an excuse, proving the existance of atoms logically at a time when the atomic hypothesis of matter was not settled is definitely not chopped liver.
> Clearly then, GOD is at fault for the mugging-at-gunpoint.
Gabriel: Oh Most Holy One. It appears your virtual world of Earth has some unforseen bugs in its design. Evidently two males can position themselves in such a way as to insert the penis of one into the anus of another. This stacks with sexual desire, and suddenly males burn with lust for each other until one's precious seed is spend inside the other's filthy shithole.
God: Me damn it! I told Lucifer that was gonna happen if I planted the deposit stalk and the vagina near the same place as the waste vomitorium. He said it wouldn't happen, but it did! I knew it would. I don't know why I trusted him.
No one denies any of this.
The problem is that it is unethical to use bots when you've agreed not to.
Tractor pulls have categories for different engine sizes, types, and gearings. Then the last pull is "bring what you've got", where anything is allowed. Perhaps some day people will have a server where any kind of bot or client hacking is allowed. But not yet!
The proper response to religious people who suggest that, without a God, there's no reason not to steal and kill is:
"Are you saying the only reason you don't kill is because God tells you not to?"
Puts them in the position of an ignorant savage who only does things because they fear punishment.
> For example, in L2, when you PK, your karma
> goes negative and you turn red. (Until your
> karma goes to -INT_MAX, at which point it wraps
> to INT_MAX, until they fixed that.)
Hehe, I'm holier than Jesus, and got that way thru mass murder.
Actually, the old testament suggests Yaweh may be in the same boat. =O
Anyone remember the old Pax Imperia game? It was a space conquest RTS where the more planets you had, the more powerful your economy, and the faster you could advance your tech and build and research larger and better-loaded ships.
There was a bug once where one of my planets was doing so poorly, the population dropped below zero, and suddenly I had about 400 trillion people on that planet. Suddenly I had enough economic phallus to build about 10 loaded dreadnaughts before they died off of starvation.
Needless to say, the game went well after that point. Sadly, that only ever happened once. (As a programmer, I suspect population, where a negative value is nonsense, had a calculation where a signed int type was involved, and incorrect casting or ignorance of integer promotion rules in intermediate steps masked a possible negative value, which was then assigned to an unsigned final integer, yielding the gigantic positive number.)
> I am assumming the poster is not a programmer.
> Programming is a complex task! I don't think
> online games will ever be hack proof. It is
> more like the real world, an arms race between
> the game programmers and the exploiters.
Ironically, there are at least two online games that allow "cheating", but only in the official way! These are Star Wars: Galaxies, where you can get a smuggler to "slice" your weapons to do a lot more damage than Darth wants to allow, and, of course, The Matrix Online, where Matrix-style bending of the rules is built right into the concept. (So much so it doesn't even seem like "cheating", so I think they goofed in this point.)
Of course, neither, and most obnoxiously, especially The Matrix Online, does not allow actual external hacking to their servers for in-game advantage, any more than any other game does.
And Star Wars: Galaxies had the extremely perverse situation once where smugglers could, using an in-game exploit, slice and re-slice the same weapon over and over again, giving it monsterous amounts of damage. Thus they over-cheated the official cheating system! Slicing the weapon was approved, even encouraged, but slicing it too much was a bannable offence!
Jeebus H. Christ-in-a-Handbasket
Actually, guns are highly beatable in fantasy worlds.
Not too many games have the bad guy go down in one shot from a gun. The only game I've seen that did was Kingpin, set on the special "real" mode. This was the only game I've ever played on its hardest mode that I couldn't beat (and I've played Icewind Dale II on Heart of Fury, starting with two scratch level 1 characters.)
Of course, in my defense, the problem was running out of ammo and health, not progression difficulties.
City of Heroes carries this the opposite direction to a ludicrous extent. You can stand there and have someone with a massive gatling gun rain bullets into you from point blank range, and barely have any damage done to you. And I'm not talking warrior types (tanker and scrapper.) A blaster (caster) vs. a green or grey can get hit with bullets and survive.
As far as I know this is nothing like poker. Poker is gambling money or items with real-world value and with that as the purpose.
This is more like people paying to play poker, and the chips were not worth real cash, just pegs on the wall. That some people can trade their peg positions for money completely outside the establishment doesn't make it like for-money poker in any meaningful sense.
So what exactly was the crime? Taking something in the game is allowed -- and a deliberate part of the game mechanics. This is not in and of itself illegal.
Furthermore, that this stuff can be sole on eBay or whatever, and thus has real-world value also does not make it illegal, either, or Lineage would have to immediately disable PvP looting regardless of whether the loot is to be sold in the real world or not, and regardless of whether Lineage officially approves of real-world sales or not.
I also doubt that is the case.
So unless it's illegal to sell in-game items in the real world, a dubious concept (and independent of whether it's a violation of the license agreement) I don't see what could be illegal here.
Now don't get me wrong. I hate this aspect of PvP. I think it ruined Ultima Online. Many are the times I wished people who did this would get a punch in the nose. But that's not the same thing as it being illegal.
Ehh, the people who do this kind of thing might very well have multiple machines and accounts (multi-boxing), with which they can power level whatever types of characters they need. And they study the minimax discussions so they can whip up that wizard who can slaughter a tank, and only a tank, in one shot, which may only be useful in, say, PvP invasion to knock people out of a valuable camp spot.
Hence, throwing their level 50 or whatever it is on Lineage II into a virtual "jail", or even banning that account, is, pardon the expression, virtually meaningless since they can powerlevel up another replacement in a few days.
Normal mortals will whine at the loss of such a high level character, but to them it's a minor irritant and just part of the cost of doing business.
As long as he didn't cheat (which a bot might be, even if it doesn't voilate the game mechanics, unlike setting your Spirit of Wolf speed to 255) then he acquired the items legitimately within the game mechanics and game design.
So if selling in-game items is not illegal, nor obviously "stealing" them, since that activity is possible and part of the game design, then I don't see what they could hold him on.
And using a bot, even if disallowed by the agreement, would be a violation of the agreement, not a crime per se. Violations of contracts are civil things. Even if this was some kind of criminal action (like a Dr. contracting to perform a heart operation, then walking away in the middle of it) what has been "stolen"? Lineage can flip a few bits and recreate the items. They may be too lazy too, or even claim they don't have to because the items were moved from one character to another via legitimate game design means.
Actually MUDs (the precursor to MMORPGs) came up with the concept of jail. Better yet, the more evil you were, the more the reward went up for your capture.
Of course, people then went around being deliberately evil, ran up the bounty, then logged in their good character, and had the good one kill the bad one for the reward.
Eh, I recall my anthropology 101 prof at U-Mich talking about how we were using his book, but he didn't get paid for that -- he only got paid for sales at other schools.
His one claim to fame was some paper likening people travelling to Mecca to people travelling to Disney World. The rich and the poor all travel together blah blah blah.
A more recent incident occured when my wife tried to help my son create a science project of a citrus fruit battery. Complete with a full-sized lightbulb socket and bulb from the hardware store, just like in the drawing!
Can't imagine why the oranges couldn't light it up. They did it just like the drawing!
So those science book guys, ancient or new, are basically not the phenomenal educators they think they are.
I had one of those science books, with the typical electrical motor you can make yourself! Complete with nails in the cork, etc.
It wasn't until 2 years later in Jr. High I figured out why it didn't work. The wires in the drawing were a stylized winding, only looping about 6 times, well spaced, on each nail. Not the tightly packed windings back and forth and back and forth actually needed to get that turd to move, even with the train set transformer cranked to 100!
I love ettiquite books from the late 1800's.
Did you know, for example, that a man should walk between a woman and the street when walking on the sidewalk, so as to protect her from horses?
Or, similarly, that a man should walk up the stairs after, and down the stairs before, a woman, so as to catch her lest she fall?
And if eating with the Queen, know the silverware is set from the outside, in, in order of expected use. Also, there is a special utensil for eating asparagus, but if that is not present, one may eat it with one's fingers (assuming it does not have sauce on it.)
They didn't even bother mentioning that flossing was rude at the table.
> As far as "just one universe" goes, more
> theoretical physicists prefer the many-worlds
> interpretation of quantum mechanics than any other.
Although it has been suggested that having the universe split into duodecillions of copies every billionth of a billionth of a nanosecond is probably the greatest imaginable violation of Occam's razor.
And what about the lightning bolt? A bright flash, yes. A jagged bolt of lightning, no.
I predict this is the only prediction that will be wrong. Consciousness will have nothing to do with quantum mechanics, except in the trivial aspect that they are both part of real-world physics.
Yes, but presumably Satan has met God personally, while I have not.
I personally see no metaphysical value in believing in God without proof. Why would believing in God without proof have value to God?
Seems strange to me.
It's almost as if...as if...as if religion were pushed into this corner of valuing faith without proof, and now pretends like it was standing there all along.
Nah, that couldn't be it!
> Yes, this change is truly astronomical.
Well, it is big enough that it will require tossing out not just detailed astronomy books, but the Cliff's Notes version as well.
Baby you said it all!
You can go to jail for showing sexual images.
God DAMN I'm proud of this country!