Not paying for -good- musician's music is a crime, both morally and legally. No matter how little of the money goes to that musician, they've worked hard for it.
Better yet, download the song and pay $2 to the artist. Fuck the record companies.
All advertising (specifically, product promotion) is fraudulent to some extent. They may claim that Big Mac tastes great in the commercials, but what if you don't think so? Then it's fraud. Maybe not legally, but ethically.
It's not possible to promote a product without lying a bit. This is called de minimis fraud, fraud within the scope of the law; fraud that cannot be avoided in capitalism.
How can something that's only been developed the last few decades become a fundamental human right? Before that, humans were all witheld that right? The creation of the internet was one of the higher goals of mankind?
Internet access in every house would allow such things as daily referendums on public issues. It makes transparency in government much more desirable, due to citizens' ability to check up on government business instantly over the Internet. It could even do away with "representative government" (dictatorship where you elect the dictators) altogether. The possibilities are endless.
Instant mass-communication allows the ultimate form of democracy. It's still in its infancy, but when it's finally achieved, people will look back upon the current systems of government just as we look back upon feudal fiefdoms in the middle ages. And from that perspective, yes, it would be viewed as a basic human right, just like freedom of speech and universal sufferage.
Yes, you would do well to compare the actions of EQ guilds to the mafia and Tony Soprano. Their motives, while differing in context, are unavoidably similar. Power, wealth, and social status.
The ultimate goal of any EQ guild is to get ahead of all other EQ guilds, acquire the best loot and items, and block the progression of any other guilds by killing important MOBs before any other guild can get their members online.
The only way to exercise power on a "blue" server (non-pvp) in EQ is to grief other players within the confines of the game rules. This means that blocking the progression of other players is a very enjoyable pasttime. It's the only way you can hurt them. Watching other guilds complain because they are stuck unable to progress in the game for weeks or months is very entertaining, and addicting. Many, many guilds do this, and relish the opportunity. And Verant/SoE does nothing to dissuade or stop it, unless you pay an extra $30/mo in subscription fees, in which case they put you on the "Legends" server, and force the other guilds to give you a chance.
To be a mafia, you really should be dabbling in illegal activities. This is true in EQ to an extent. The only rule that Verant/SoE consistently enforces on end-game guilds is the no-exploit rule: "You can't take advantage of flaws in the game design to kill something more easily or more quickly than Verant/SoE wants you to."
As a matter of fact, this rule is broken very often in the name of getting ahead of the competition. Nearly every EQ guild exploits something: if not MOB pathing, then a spell that's too powerful, a quirk in the Feign Death ability, etc. It's the way the game is played. Some might argue that the game is so flawed that it's impossible NOT to use an exploit now and then in the course of playing an honest game.
Anyway, for further reading, you can check out this article on EQ I wrote way back in December. It goes into some of the problems with the game that lead to a mafia mentality taking over the social structure, and the apathy of the development company. A few of the comments were pretty good, also.
The debate over copyright is the debate over the merits of a system of artificial scarcity. It costs virtually nothing to send a song over the Internet compared to shipping it via a physical medium -- CD.
The battles being fought here and now raise very important questions for our society. How much of what we create should be deemed personal property? To many, the very concept of "Intellectual Property" (Intellectual Robbery?) is absurd, due to there being no cost of distribution for an idea. This is summarized in the cliche idiom "information wants to be free".
But, what value does this artificial monopoly on an idea give to us? It obviously costs something in time and money to create ideas and technologies. Has anyone done a scientific study comparing the creativity levels of countries with differing copyright systems? I'd love to see one done, as its results could shed light on the (non-)benefits given by extending copyright terms.
"Copy Protection" is a lovely euphamism that hides the true nature of the technology. That is, robbing the public domain for the benefit of a single entity or person. It's a benefit to the few at the expense of the many. Its effects have already been taken to their logical extremes in many articles and posts (such as the article in question), so I won't go into them here.
Someday, scarcity for physical objects will be reduced to the level that we see for "intellectual property" on the Internet. That is, the cost of producing cars, gadgets, and MP3 players will be next to nothing. Will we battle over patents then just as we battle over copyright now? Will a future MIAA (Manufacturer Industry Association of America) sue dozens of college students for $96B because they "printed out" a copy of a new gadget?
Already, in genomics, the cost of discovering the function of a gene in the human genome confers upon the discoverer a monopoly on its use in drugs and treatments. This allows research firms to plant flags on the genes in our bodies, and charge whatever licensing fees they could imagine for their use. Even if the cost of the retrovirus to be distributed into our bodies to flip this genomic "switch" is virtually nothing, we will end up paying thousands of dollars per treatment, not just to fund the development of new therapies, but to line the pockets of the company's shareholders. In essence, we are turning our own bodies into a natural resource to be raped and pillaged by corporate interests, at the expense of the poor and less-fortunate of the world. We uphold these injustices with patents and law, humanely defending the inhumane capitalism which drives the pharmaseutical industry.
Someday we may see copy protection for gene therapy. What if a company found a way to control the ability of your body to propogate the benefits of a genomic treatment? What if your cells could not reproduce the gene after X cell generations, and you had to go back and pay for another treatment to continue seeing the benefits? Such a situation is not much different from the plight of AIDS sufferers, whose lives depend on a stream of artificially expensive, but lifesaving drugs.
I believe the copyright and copy-protection battles of today merely foreshadow a larger and more fundamental battle to come, one that will see the current government monopolies confered by Patents and Copyright turned on their heads.
That was the Velious expansion with ToV, not Luclin. Obviously, taking both your posts together, you know precisely jack shit about the game and its CS history.
Corruption and preying on players for amusement is rampant in the EQ guide program. For most people, it's a slack way to get yourself a free account. You can sneak onto the server at 3am when nobody else is there, and do whatever the hell you want. You don't even have to answer a single petition, the guide reports are on the honor system. I and many others simply made up reports and bullshit petitions to fill in for the manditory 6-hours per week. Bingo: Free account, no work, and endless hours power-tripping across the game world.
For example, a guide friend of mine would sit outside the North Freeport bank, and open the locked door at the back of the bank. This door is never opened by players, because the lock level on the door is some absurdly high level. Invariably, someone curious would wander into this back "closet" behind the door to have a look around. This is when the guide would close the door, locking the player inside. If the player was a caster, they could just gate out, but a melee-type character was stuck more-or-less forever. The guide would wait for this player to petition after a few minutes, then delete the petition, and/zone away, laughing his ass off at the poor sap caught in the trap.
Don't pretend this doesn't happen to GMs also. The GM of Mithaniel Marr back in 2001, "Chaolash", was fired for doing favors for friends on his server. Making them free items, spawning mobs for his friends, and so on. Occaisionally these GMs turn abusive, Chao did it, and I'm sure other GMs have also. He wasn't the only GM "quietly" let go for abuses, and he won't be the last.
I don't know if you really were a guide, but I suspect not. If you were, You must have been one of those dumbass Apprentice guides we'd flunk out of the program within their first trial week. You know, the ones who couldn't answer a petition for free GM lewt inside of 10 minutes, and without escalating it two times for the GM to smack you down like the idiot you were for wasting his time.
The one invariable fact of MMORPGs is, in that they are just artificial social ladders to climb, there will always be people who base their entire lives on trying to climb them. They define their self-esteem from these ladders, because these games are the world to them. Generally they have no social lives, and/or are young, or are disabled/sedentary. THESE are the people who are capable of doing the things mentioned in the Shadowbane article. Coincidentally, these are also the prime market targets for the gaming companies. It's inevitable that someone would take advantage of a bug granting GM abilities, and the game companies have only themselves to blame for leaving the back door wide open.
As for the EQ Guide Program, I quit after about 16 months of service. In general, they treat(ed) their guides like small mushrooms: kept in the dark, and eating shit all day. The guide liason at the time was about as friendly and responsive as an IRS Tax clerk, and the system itself was biased to mistrust guides (perhaps justifiably) to such an extent that we couldn't do anything significant for the players besides get them unstuck from a wall. Anything of note had to be handled by a GM. It is this atmosphere that breeds reactions like the Veeshan's Peak incident (for which the person was banned from Everquest permanently, BTW). And this atmosphere, according to friends of mine still in the program, shows no signs of changing anytime soon.
Lastly. I wrote a long article about Everquest and its flaws for Slashdot. You can read it here:
Just look at how often Palestinians suicide bomb Israelis...and Israel brags it has the most stringent security in the world.
Not nearly stringent enough, they need to crack down more. Deporting every Palestinian to Syria at gunpoint would be a great start. Then seal the border Korean style.
The ultimate solution to the problem is to let computers write the software themselves. Give them a goal, set up evolutionary and genetic algorithms, and let them go at it on a supercomputer cluster for a few months.
Of course, you'd need to make sure the algorithms that humans wrote aren't flawed themselves, but once you got that pinned down, you would be more or less home-free.
Even if you didn't take this drastic a step, another solution would be computer-aided software burn-in. Let the computer test the software for bugs. A super-QA Analysis if you will. Log complete program traces for every trial run, and let the machine put the software through every input/output possiblity.
Why are a public university's funds and time being used to benefit a private company? Last I checked, Google isn't a charity. Doesn't Google have its own programmers? Wouldn't these "CS Researchers'" time be better spent furthering science instead of being free labor for corporations, at the expense of taxpayers?
The Saturday morning cartoon disappeared when the all-day cartoon networks reached cable and satellite TV, and indeed, when cable and satellite TV achieved dominant market penetration.
In the 80s, cable TV only had what, 30 channels? Nowadays the numbers are in the low hundreds and growing. Since there were so few channels to serve such a broad spectrum of interests, the 'Saturday morning' was born to cater to kids who'd be up early while their parents slept in. Later on in the day, they'd switch over to '100 Huntley Street' and all the boring 'grown-up' religion shows.
Nowadays, there is no need for this. There are several all-day cartoon networks, and dozens of kid-specific networks. On-demand Pay Per View kid movies help too. Cartoons are no longer limited to Saturday morning because there's more channels, more availability, and more kids watching all day long.
I wonder, would you so casually and objectively observe the role disease plays in maintaining human populations if you or someone you love were dying from a preventable disease? I kind of doubt it.
Everybody dies, man. It's inevitable. It's a part of life. Why are you so skeptical of any point of view that doesn't view death as a tragedy?
And that reaction would have saved millions of lives...
Bullshit. We'd have billions of otherwise healthy people who'd be susceptible of dying to a flu-like disease, because their parents were never screened for immunity.
Death is a part of life. Death is a part of evolution and natural selection, and viral disease is a part of this process. It preys on those who are vulnerable, leaving (mostly) the strong.
I wonder, if we can so casually and objectively observe the role disease plays in maintaining plant and animal populations, why the hell are we so blind to the role it plays in human ones?
Don't be a sentimental idiot. The moon is a big, sterile rock. Blowing up 1/10000000th of it won't have any negative effects whatsoever... meteors crash onto its surface regularly, you know.
Heh. News flash, the genders aren't equal. One of them can bear children, the other can't. Other differences exist.
Instead of trying to say both genders are equal, why not try this radical approach: accept that one gender has advantages over the other in some areas, and vice versa in others, and use those differences for the greater good!
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet, download the song and pay $2 to the artist. Fuck the record companies.
All advertising (specifically, product promotion) is fraudulent to some extent. They may claim that Big Mac tastes great in the commercials, but what if you don't think so? Then it's fraud. Maybe not legally, but ethically.
It's not possible to promote a product without lying a bit. This is called de minimis fraud, fraud within the scope of the law; fraud that cannot be avoided in capitalism.
Maybe to let people who read it before the correction know it was wrong?
Bell ADSL 1mbps/256k in the Ottawa area is $25/mo. In most cases, cheaper than the rest of your phone bill.
Internet access in every house would allow such things as daily referendums on public issues. It makes transparency in government much more desirable, due to citizens' ability to check up on government business instantly over the Internet. It could even do away with "representative government" (dictatorship where you elect the dictators) altogether. The possibilities are endless.
Instant mass-communication allows the ultimate form of democracy. It's still in its infancy, but when it's finally achieved, people will look back upon the current systems of government just as we look back upon feudal fiefdoms in the middle ages. And from that perspective, yes, it would be viewed as a basic human right, just like freedom of speech and universal sufferage.
Yes, you would do well to compare the actions of EQ guilds to the mafia and Tony Soprano. Their motives, while differing in context, are unavoidably similar. Power, wealth, and social status.
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The ultimate goal of any EQ guild is to get ahead of all other EQ guilds, acquire the best loot and items, and block the progression of any other guilds by killing important MOBs before any other guild can get their members online.
The only way to exercise power on a "blue" server (non-pvp) in EQ is to grief other players within the confines of the game rules. This means that blocking the progression of other players is a very enjoyable pasttime. It's the only way you can hurt them. Watching other guilds complain because they are stuck unable to progress in the game for weeks or months is very entertaining, and addicting. Many, many guilds do this, and relish the opportunity. And Verant/SoE does nothing to dissuade or stop it, unless you pay an extra $30/mo in subscription fees, in which case they put you on the "Legends" server, and force the other guilds to give you a chance.
To be a mafia, you really should be dabbling in illegal activities. This is true in EQ to an extent. The only rule that Verant/SoE consistently enforces on end-game guilds is the no-exploit rule: "You can't take advantage of flaws in the game design to kill something more easily or more quickly than Verant/SoE wants you to."
As a matter of fact, this rule is broken very often in the name of getting ahead of the competition. Nearly every EQ guild exploits something: if not MOB pathing, then a spell that's too powerful, a quirk in the Feign Death ability, etc. It's the way the game is played. Some might argue that the game is so flawed that it's impossible NOT to use an exploit now and then in the course of playing an honest game.
Anyway, for further reading, you can check out this article on EQ I wrote way back in December. It goes into some of the problems with the game that lead to a mafia mentality taking over the social structure, and the apathy of the development company. A few of the comments were pretty good, also.
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/12/27/1748252.sht
The debate over copyright is the debate over the merits of a system of artificial scarcity. It costs virtually nothing to send a song over the Internet compared to shipping it via a physical medium -- CD.
The battles being fought here and now raise very important questions for our society. How much of what we create should be deemed personal property? To many, the very concept of "Intellectual Property" (Intellectual Robbery?) is absurd, due to there being no cost of distribution for an idea. This is summarized in the cliche idiom "information wants to be free".
But, what value does this artificial monopoly on an idea give to us? It obviously costs something in time and money to create ideas and technologies. Has anyone done a scientific study comparing the creativity levels of countries with differing copyright systems? I'd love to see one done, as its results could shed light on the (non-)benefits given by extending copyright terms.
"Copy Protection" is a lovely euphamism that hides the true nature of the technology. That is, robbing the public domain for the benefit of a single entity or person. It's a benefit to the few at the expense of the many. Its effects have already been taken to their logical extremes in many articles and posts (such as the article in question), so I won't go into them here.
Someday, scarcity for physical objects will be reduced to the level that we see for "intellectual property" on the Internet. That is, the cost of producing cars, gadgets, and MP3 players will be next to nothing. Will we battle over patents then just as we battle over copyright now? Will a future MIAA (Manufacturer Industry Association of America) sue dozens of college students for $96B because they "printed out" a copy of a new gadget?
Already, in genomics, the cost of discovering the function of a gene in the human genome confers upon the discoverer a monopoly on its use in drugs and treatments. This allows research firms to plant flags on the genes in our bodies, and charge whatever licensing fees they could imagine for their use. Even if the cost of the retrovirus to be distributed into our bodies to flip this genomic "switch" is virtually nothing, we will end up paying thousands of dollars per treatment, not just to fund the development of new therapies, but to line the pockets of the company's shareholders. In essence, we are turning our own bodies into a natural resource to be raped and pillaged by corporate interests, at the expense of the poor and less-fortunate of the world. We uphold these injustices with patents and law, humanely defending the inhumane capitalism which drives the pharmaseutical industry.
Someday we may see copy protection for gene therapy. What if a company found a way to control the ability of your body to propogate the benefits of a genomic treatment? What if your cells could not reproduce the gene after X cell generations, and you had to go back and pay for another treatment to continue seeing the benefits? Such a situation is not much different from the plight of AIDS sufferers, whose lives depend on a stream of artificially expensive, but lifesaving drugs.
I believe the copyright and copy-protection battles of today merely foreshadow a larger and more fundamental battle to come, one that will see the current government monopolies confered by Patents and Copyright turned on their heads.
That was the Velious expansion with ToV, not Luclin. Obviously, taking both your posts together, you know precisely jack shit about the game and its CS history.
Corruption and preying on players for amusement is rampant in the EQ guide program. For most people, it's a slack way to get yourself a free account. You can sneak onto the server at 3am when nobody else is there, and do whatever the hell you want. You don't even have to answer a single petition, the guide reports are on the honor system. I and many others simply made up reports and bullshit petitions to fill in for the manditory 6-hours per week. Bingo: Free account, no work, and endless hours power-tripping across the game world.
For example, a guide friend of mine would sit outside the North Freeport bank, and open the locked door at the back of the bank. This door is never opened by players, because the lock level on the door is some absurdly high level. Invariably, someone curious would wander into this back "closet" behind the door to have a look around. This is when the guide would close the door, locking the player inside. If the player was a caster, they could just gate out, but a melee-type character was stuck more-or-less forever. The guide would wait for this player to petition after a few minutes, then delete the petition, and
Don't pretend this doesn't happen to GMs also. The GM of Mithaniel Marr back in 2001, "Chaolash", was fired for doing favors for friends on his server. Making them free items, spawning mobs for his friends, and so on. Occaisionally these GMs turn abusive, Chao did it, and I'm sure other GMs have also. He wasn't the only GM "quietly" let go for abuses, and he won't be the last.
I don't know if you really were a guide, but I suspect not. If you were, You must have been one of those dumbass Apprentice guides we'd flunk out of the program within their first trial week. You know, the ones who couldn't answer a petition for free GM lewt inside of 10 minutes, and without escalating it two times for the GM to smack you down like the idiot you were for wasting his time.
The one invariable fact of MMORPGs is, in that they are just artificial social ladders to climb, there will always be people who base their entire lives on trying to climb them. They define their self-esteem from these ladders, because these games are the world to them. Generally they have no social lives, and/or are young, or are disabled/sedentary. THESE are the people who are capable of doing the things mentioned in the Shadowbane article. Coincidentally, these are also the prime market targets for the gaming companies. It's inevitable that someone would take advantage of a bug granting GM abilities, and the game companies have only themselves to blame for leaving the back door wide open.
As for the EQ Guide Program, I quit after about 16 months of service. In general, they treat(ed) their guides like small mushrooms: kept in the dark, and eating shit all day. The guide liason at the time was about as friendly and responsive as an IRS Tax clerk, and the system itself was biased to mistrust guides (perhaps justifiably) to such an extent that we couldn't do anything significant for the players besides get them unstuck from a wall. Anything of note had to be handled by a GM. It is this atmosphere that breeds reactions like the Veeshan's Peak incident (for which the person was banned from Everquest permanently, BTW). And this atmosphere, according to friends of mine still in the program, shows no signs of changing anytime soon.
Lastly. I wrote a long article about Everquest and its flaws for Slashdot. You can read it here:
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/12/27/1748252.sht
Not nearly stringent enough, they need to crack down more. Deporting every Palestinian to Syria at gunpoint would be a great start. Then seal the border Korean style.
The ultimate solution to the problem is to let computers write the software themselves. Give them a goal, set up evolutionary and genetic algorithms, and let them go at it on a supercomputer cluster for a few months.
Of course, you'd need to make sure the algorithms that humans wrote aren't flawed themselves, but once you got that pinned down, you would be more or less home-free.
Even if you didn't take this drastic a step, another solution would be computer-aided software burn-in. Let the computer test the software for bugs. A super-QA Analysis if you will. Log complete program traces for every trial run, and let the machine put the software through every input/output possiblity.
clicky
Full Mirror Here.
Why are a public university's funds and time being used to benefit a private company? Last I checked, Google isn't a charity. Doesn't Google have its own programmers? Wouldn't these "CS Researchers'" time be better spent furthering science instead of being free labor for corporations, at the expense of taxpayers?
The Saturday morning cartoon disappeared when the all-day cartoon networks reached cable and satellite TV, and indeed, when cable and satellite TV achieved dominant market penetration.
In the 80s, cable TV only had what, 30 channels? Nowadays the numbers are in the low hundreds and growing. Since there were so few channels to serve such a broad spectrum of interests, the 'Saturday morning' was born to cater to kids who'd be up early while their parents slept in. Later on in the day, they'd switch over to '100 Huntley Street' and all the boring 'grown-up' religion shows.
Nowadays, there is no need for this. There are several all-day cartoon networks, and dozens of kid-specific networks. On-demand Pay Per View kid movies help too. Cartoons are no longer limited to Saturday morning because there's more channels, more availability, and more kids watching all day long.
Just don't support Karma Whores, mod up the AC post instead.
"This Abstract has been viewed 415 times"
Hope they didn't use a short int for that counter variable.
It'd be nice to find that terrorist or serial killer walking among us with technology like this.
The bleeding-heart privacy advocates can go cry in the corner as they always do. Nobody cares that you pick your nose when you're all alone.
So run them in parallel. A billion DNA strands can fit on the head of a pin. More could fit in a beaker.
They're getting incredibly old, and stereotypes are bad. Pick on nerds instead, they're scrawny and wear glasses.
Everybody dies, man. It's inevitable. It's a part of life. Why are you so skeptical of any point of view that doesn't view death as a tragedy?
Bullshit. We'd have billions of otherwise healthy people who'd be susceptible of dying to a flu-like disease, because their parents were never screened for immunity.
Death is a part of life. Death is a part of evolution and natural selection, and viral disease is a part of this process. It preys on those who are vulnerable, leaving (mostly) the strong.
I wonder, if we can so casually and objectively observe the role disease plays in maintaining plant and animal populations, why the hell are we so blind to the role it plays in human ones?
Test everyone for AIDS, and throw them into a biohazard incinerator if they test positive.
You don't have to cure the disease, you just have to sterilize anyone that has it.
Don't be a sentimental idiot. The moon is a big, sterile rock. Blowing up 1/10000000th of it won't have any negative effects whatsoever... meteors crash onto its surface regularly, you know.
Heh. News flash, the genders aren't equal. One of them can bear children, the other can't. Other differences exist.
Instead of trying to say both genders are equal, why not try this radical approach: accept that one gender has advantages over the other in some areas, and vice versa in others, and use those differences for the greater good!
Mod parent up, he has an excellent point. Don't like the current political situation? Do something about it.