Caffeine doesn't present a problem for everyone. Case in point, I was out at the all-night Dunkin Donuts with a couple of friends around midnight last night, and since I got there early, got an extra large coffee. Finished it before I got home, and went right to sleep. I've always been able to do that. If I want to stay awake, caffiene will help me do that, but if I want to sleep, it doesn't stop me.
Of course, a friend of mine suffers from chronic insomnia (he'll go for 2-3 days just unable to get more than a half nap, starts losing it) and he does have to watch his coffee intake late at night if he wants to actually be sane and aware the next morning.
Re:Dean for President
on
Saving the Net
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This was nothing about what the Internet "was all about". This is a bit of what it could have been, and may just be. The Internet "was all about" military communications. DARPA. Get it through your thick skulls you mush brained flower power idiots. The Internet wasn't created to bring world peace and harmony through greater communication. At best, it allows people to find people they like who they wouldn't even have met, while at the same time allowing them to find and harrass people they didn't even know they hated. At worst it's as much a tool of opression as any other you care to mention.
It's a tool. A thing. It can and will be used by your enemies as effectively as your allies.
You, and people like you, sound like the blithering idiots that would claim that nuclear energy would save the world and usher in a world of peace and prosperity with flying cars.
Revolution? Merely getting Democrats in office won't change anything. Clinton started us down the slippry slope and Bush is gleefully rolling the country down it. Of the current crop of presidential candidates only Howard Dean seems relatively free of corporate allegiance, though I suspect there's merely stuff that's being hid.
If you're going to enjoy games, you have to realize that publishers go to where the money is.
This is just plain silly and brain damaged. Of course I realize that publishers are going to take money they're being given, like Microsoft was giving Sega. That doesn't mean I enjoy "games" any more or less. Maybe you can play a game or watch a movie without seeing the sequel, but that isn't something I do.
If you want to have the consoles on which they publish, spend the money to have them all.
I don't want to have all the consoles on which they publish. I thought my original post made that abundantly clear. Buying an Xbox would be a complete waste of my money. Maybe it isn't for you, I don't know. I don't care where Sega publishes their stuff. If they don't publish it for a platform I have, I won't buy it. *shrugs* Hell, if Microsoft bought off every major gaming franchise as an Xbox exclusive I have enough games in my house that I haven't played more then 10 minutes of to last me the rest of my life, never mind games that I just haven't beaten yet.
Target audience had nothing to do with it. It's all about the Benjamins. Dinero. Cashola.
Microsoft paid Sega to bring most of it's Dreamcast franchises over to the Xbox, and didn't care much about target market. They just wanted games on the shelves, and Sega needed the cash, so they said sure. I almost bought an Xbox for JSRF, but after playing it on a friend's Xbox, I'm glad I didn't. I was pissed as hell when Sega pulled Shenmue 2 out of the US DC release schedule because MS paid them off. Shenmue was the reason I bought the DC. Sega fell over themselves claiming that it would be released in the US, and at the last minute pulled it. So they can release or not release Shenmue 3 wherever, 'cause I couldn't care less. I tossed my copy of the first one in the trash, not even bothering to finish it. Waste of time since I'll never know the end of the story.
I'm more than well aware of the people who believe that role-playing is some pure, unsullied ideal which everyone who plays these games must aspire to. I deal with them far too often, and wish they would find this role-playing nirvana they're after so they can leave me the hell alone. However, I think most of these people would be better served taking acting lessons than playing games.
Role-playing games are not the same as acting. Some of them get a good approximation thereof (like Mind's Eye Theatre stuff from White Wolf and a hard-nosed DM on a Neverwinter persistent world) but what your looking for is over there with all the theatre majors. Final Fantasy VII isn't an acting game, it's a role-playing game. The term has come to define that style of game, and all kinds of variations on the theme, but acting ain't a part of it. Most MMORPGs that have ever been are just the same kind of thing with you able to talk with tons of other people and interact with their versions of Cloud Strife, Tifa, Cid, or whomever. Frankly, Warcraft 3, Shogun: Total War, Quake, Half Life, and just about any other non-puzzle game in existance is as much an acting game as Everquest, Baldur's Gate, or any other so-called "role-playing" game.
I actually like acting, but a game is at best a mediocre stage, and online gaming is the worst of the lot. There are people who have a blast doing it, and more power to them, but acting like the rest of us are ruining your performance is sad.
Dark Age of Camelot has servers specifically set aside for those who wish a complete in-character experience. The most populated of them is the single most populous server in the game, and there are two others that are middle and low population respectively, not because they've made it that way, they just are.
The roleplaying servers are watched over in a pretty draconian fasion by the CSRs and a lot of players on those servers will appeal every little thing they find inappropriate in public chat, or name choice, keeping those CSRs quite busy with name changes/etc.
Me, I don't play on them, because I find the whole idea to be pretty ludicrous, but I'm glad there's a place like that for people who enjoy it to do it without butting heads with the rest of us, as happened on the cooperative server (which I play on exclusively now) right after it was launched.
I completely agree. I wasn't actually disagreeing with any of that.
I was merely addressing the claim made in the parent (and what a lot of people all over seem to think) that reviewers just never give bad reviews for anything.
Well, I wouldn't say that they NEVER do anything but praise games. One quick look through IGN, Gamespot, or even Gamespy will show you several games that didn't make the reviewer's grade. However, the problem is that it appears how big the marketing blitz for a game is directly affects the ratings these games are given. I present this as an example of what I mean:
bad game + huge marketing blitz= mediocre rating same bad game + medium marketing = good rating same bad game + no or little marketing = Worst Game Ever mediocre game + huge marketing blitz = Best Game So Far This Year mediocre game + medium marketing = good rating mediocre game + no or little marketing = mediocre rating good game + huge marketing blitz = Game of the Year Candidate good game + medium marketing = Don't ignore this one good game + no or little marketing = Sleeper Hit
What this all boils down to is that I don't believe the game review business has degenerated to the point that you cannot get a good review unless you've paid for one. I can't think of more than a handful of instances where I've seen an unambiguously good game get a poor review where the reviewer actually played the game. What appears to be the case so far is that you can improve your game's rating by spending a lot of money "on the reviewers". Interviews, junkets, free games, hell maybe actual cash for an improved rating. All part of the marketing blitz, I would imagine. Try to market the game so people look past the flaws they wouldn't look past otherwise. Like, say, the major flaws in SWG which everyone passes off as minor, I can only imagine because they've had so much marketing money spent on them.
The "console war" propaganda has been mostly fed by gamer news sites, and propagated by sites like news.com who don't really know better. The Great Console War is frankly a figment of the gaming rags wanting something to make noise about to sell ads. It's the perfect excuse for it.
Yes, there is competition. Yes, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are fiercely competing for all the console sales they can get. However, the kind of vitriol that ordinary gamers throw about on the whole thing just doesn't come up on it's own, and I don't ever remember Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft talking up this competition NEARLY as much as the gaming websites and magazines have, completely on their own. They're the ones that have polls/forums where you're encoraged to sound off about why you think the makers of Console X, Y, and Z are complete and utter losers, and their mothers are idiots for not killing them at birth, and anyone who buys console X, Y, or Z should just be put out of their misery because they don't have a dman clue.
Those opinions and the fact that the number of people playing AC2 is less that was expected could be reasons to need less servers, but the main two reason were stated above.
Both of the reasons you stated above have everything to do with the fact that it's a hideously unpopular MMORPG. If the game was at all popular, they wouldn't need to get rid of OVER HALF of the servers in order to have increased interactivity and better server populations.
Also, if there were actually people playing this game, the cost of running the servers wouldn't be the issue. See: Dark Age of Camelot, which has 20 servers running, and only one of those is slated to be decomissioned any time soon (there are two PvP servers, and the popularity of them has declined severely, so one is going away). They don't have an economic problem keeping five times the number of servers Asheron's Call 2 will soon be running, now do they?
And yes, Personal opinions of the game DO factor into the decision to consolidate, because the personal opinions of gamers are what is resulting in hardly anyone playing the game.
I personally believe if this debate is not stated more clearly and in a broder context of these few products we see on the market the later systems we fear will be in place before we have a voice to do anything about them.
That assumes that we have a voice in stopping it now. There is literally no way outside of getting laws passed to stop anyone from doing this. "Privacy concerns" are not "privacy laws". Governments don't want privacy because it lessens the control they have over their people. While a few bones may be thrown out to keep people looking elsewhere, there have been ZERO hard privacy gains since this whole issue has come to the forefront. Terrorism, corporate dominance over government (to a lesser extent in Europe) and the general fear that has gripped most of the world these days are eating away at privacy, and nothing will be done about it. People who care about their privacy are in the minority. Maybe if everyone isn't at each other's throats some time in the future (not likely) we might get some gains, but I can't see a damn thing changing for a long time.
Get used to it, or get used to complaining for the rest of your life about it.
In each one of those cases, you are not the victim of a crime. The person they are impersonating, or who's computers they are using without authorization are.
They send mail via one or more systems that are used as proxies, without their prior consent
If they have open proxies/relays, then they are arguably implicity allowing anyone to use them without prior authorization. If they hacked the relay, that's another matter. Either way, no crime is committed against the reciever of the spam, and it is soley the proxy/relay owner's responsibility to press charges.
They use sender addresses that do not belong to them, but to other people
IANAL, so I don't know if you can sue someone who wrote someone else's return address on mail they send you. Perhaps fraud. Either way, it's the fraud that's the crime, not sending spam. And even then, I'm not sure any laws applying to postal fraud even cover e-mail use.
They advertise websites that they do not host themselves, but have put on hacked machines or they use hacked machines as proxies
Again, this is a crime against the owners of the hacked machines, not you, the reciever of spam directed at those machines.
This means they are not inventive users of the system as it is designed, but abusers that use false identities.
I agree. However, making the owners of open proxies and mail relays aware of what they are allowing people do do with their machines and trying to get them to close them up, securing the machines they attempt to subvert illegally, and prosecuting them for computer intrusion and identity theft is what should be done. Not stopping unsolicited advertisements.
When you get your cable service you have nothing to say about the ads, but when some person cuts away the programme and starts transmitting his porn or other abusive material, under the station logo of a known station or listing your name on the screen, you have some base for complaining.
Sure you can complain, but YOU don't have the right to sue over it. The station that's being impersonated does. The only real control you have is to call your cable provider and cancel the service because the channels they provide or the cable provider themselves are doing a good enough job for you.
Unless you change the law to allow me to prosecute someone for a crime committed against someone else. Of course, that is when I excercise my right to complain by leaving for a more sane country, or go build myself a cabin in the wilderness if no country doesn't do something so stupid.
Silent Hill 2 freaked the everloving bejeezus right out of me, down the road, and off into some inconspicuous bushes to hide from the bad plastic coated zombie men scraping their exposed leg bones on the pavement somewhere out there in the blackness.
I do not want to play Silent Hill 3. However, I will be there on Aug 6 with my debit card, trying to hold my friend back from the game store dorr as he tries to hold me back from the self-same door. But we won't succeed.
I paid under $30 for it, and I'm enjoying it a lot. Patience. The price will drop, either new or used, eventually. I waited a LONG time for.hack//Infection to drop in price and thought it wasn't ever going to. Now it's $30 new, and I'm going to be able to pick it up for less than that used.
If you want bounty hunting, try EVE: The Second Genesis. It's not exactly a Star Wars substitute (no jedi, and you're in your ship all the time) but you certainly can put bounties on people and take those missions up for others. And the area you have to hunt them in is FAR larger than what SWG lets you play in.
It's not an RPG (more like Freelancer or Escape Velocity online) and there's undoubtably tedium if you do a lot of mining/industrial/courier work past the initial ramp-up to getting a decent ship, but bounty hunting/pirate hunting can be harrowing. At least something to look into.
The people I know who play it certainly just play it because it's Star Wars and for no other reason. That kind of "loyalty" can only last so long, though. That, and Star Wars games are almost universally awful, so a game that is merely OK is worlds better than say, Force Commander, to pick a random example.
The US has, in the past, threatened to walk out of international talks because other participants refused to consider the implementation of DMCA-esque laws.
To which I wonder why anyone cares if they believe the US only wants to increase their dominance through those talks? I should think further isolating America would serve the purpose of European politicians quite satisfactorily.
I write this as a fervent anti-USA fanboy, because I don't like what your country does (promote horrid fast-food chains, promote dumb commercial television/channels, spread the belief that once you have a lot of money it doesn't matter how you got it, and overpromoted godawfull pop-music).
Last I checked the US government doesn't come over to a European nation with an armored brigade and force people at gunpoint to go into McDonalds, buy Coke, watch American-style TV, or make people buy music they don't want to hear. You'll need to have a chat with your fellow citizens about that, as they wouldn't eat the food, buy the drinks, watch the TV/movies, or buy the music unless THEY WANTED TO. Hell, even in hideously authoritarian countries with dictators supported by America, if they're allowed to have music, you're generally not seeing press gangs out there pushing people into record stores and making them buy Britney Spears albums instead of saintly local "artists". If your fellow citizens didn't want all the cultural shit we make available, they wouldn't buy it. While I may not like most of it myself, I have no sympathy for those who buy into the obviously fake American lifestyle our corporations are selling. It's your damage for buying it. The last thing the world needs is a War on American Culture to compete for Dumbest Thing Ever with America's own War on Drugs.
And greed isn't an American export. Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, all have that down pat. What, you just jealous that America is better at being greedy than you are? Suit yourself.
And luckily the framers didn't classify protected speech as merely political dissent, or else the USA would be in far worse trouble than it is.
Re:I have said it before and I will say it again..
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In Pursuit Of A Spammer
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, if UCE costs you money, you need to either work on making the practice illegal (which I don't care one way or the other about) or failing that, decide whether the financial cost you bring upon yourself by using the international e-mail system is worth the benefits you recieve from it.
It is NOT theft of service for you to recieve an e-mail you didn't request. It is a symptom of the system working exactly as originally designed. The e-mail system has the automatic and unquestioned acceptance of all messaging as it's fatal flaw. It is part of the deal. It's what allows you to send e-mail to your long lost friend that didn't know your e-mail address, or to e-mail some customer support service at Amazon or what not, or e-mail your family to let them know you're OK after surviving the Twin Towers disaster, or whatever. That's what it was designed to do. It has strengths and glaring weaknesses, and when you participate in the system, you are willingly putting yourself at the mercy those weaknesses. If someone sends you a truckload of stuff you don't want through your e-mail service, and you pay by the byte for downloading it, your service is no more being stolen than a zillion people hitting a website where they pay by the byte for traffic, because the service is functioning the way it was designed. If you couldn't afford all that, you shouldn't have signed up for a per-byte Internet service. If you want to avoid the pitfalls of e-mail you need to find or make yourself a service that doesn't have this particular fatal flaw. That, or keep working to make the practice illegal wherever you are, which patches a technical hole with a legal or political tub of spackle. However, unless they invade another person's equipment to send the UCE to you, they aren't committing any kind of crime by doing it, at least in the USA. And even if they do that, you aren't the one who's having the crime committed against them, unless it was your machine they used as the relay.
Here's a decent example...
I don't have cable television service because I have decided that I hate the flood of ads and other comercial idiocy far more than what I would use it for is worth. I could have rigged up a TIVO or ReplayTV or some other one of the myriad solutions out there for removing ads, if I wanted to, but I decided the hassle wasn't worth the cost. Just because I don't want the ads there, doesn't mean I have a leg to stand on demanding that they not be there. I can take measures to remove them or avoid them, and any cost I incur because of those measures is COMPLETELY MY FAULT. Same with UCE. If I don't like it, I either run a spam blocker of some ilk, take great pains to never give out my e-mail address to someone I don't trust completely with it, learn to deal with it, or chuck e-mail entirely. If I decide to do any of those things, I've only myself to blame for the inconvenience/cost associated with them, because it isn't theft for spammers to use the service the way it was designed.
So basically, you can send the invoice to whomever you damn well please, and it'll probably get deleted, ignored, or cause someone to bust a blood vessel at the gall of some idiot on the Internet who thinks he can send bills to whomever he thinks deserves to pay for his problems.
Re:I have said it before and I will say it again..
on
In Pursuit Of A Spammer
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· Score: 4, Informative
Call up your local post office and tell them you want to refuse all fourth class mail.
That will get rid of the majority of your postal problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Caffeine doesn't present a problem for everyone. Case in point, I was out at the all-night Dunkin Donuts with a couple of friends around midnight last night, and since I got there early, got an extra large coffee. Finished it before I got home, and went right to sleep. I've always been able to do that. If I want to stay awake, caffiene will help me do that, but if I want to sleep, it doesn't stop me.
Of course, a friend of mine suffers from chronic insomnia (he'll go for 2-3 days just unable to get more than a half nap, starts losing it) and he does have to watch his coffee intake late at night if he wants to actually be sane and aware the next morning.
This was nothing about what the Internet "was all about". This is a bit of what it could have been, and may just be. The Internet "was all about" military communications. DARPA. Get it through your thick skulls you mush brained flower power idiots. The Internet wasn't created to bring world peace and harmony through greater communication. At best, it allows people to find people they like who they wouldn't even have met, while at the same time allowing them to find and harrass people they didn't even know they hated. At worst it's as much a tool of opression as any other you care to mention.
It's a tool. A thing. It can and will be used by your enemies as effectively as your allies.
You, and people like you, sound like the blithering idiots that would claim that nuclear energy would save the world and usher in a world of peace and prosperity with flying cars.
Revolution? Merely getting Democrats in office won't change anything. Clinton started us down the slippry slope and Bush is gleefully rolling the country down it. Of the current crop of presidential candidates only Howard Dean seems relatively free of corporate allegiance, though I suspect there's merely stuff that's being hid.
If you're going to enjoy games, you have to realize that publishers go to where the money is.
This is just plain silly and brain damaged. Of course I realize that publishers are going to take money they're being given, like Microsoft was giving Sega. That doesn't mean I enjoy "games" any more or less. Maybe you can play a game or watch a movie without seeing the sequel, but that isn't something I do.
If you want to have the consoles on which they publish, spend the money to have them all.
I don't want to have all the consoles on which they publish. I thought my original post made that abundantly clear. Buying an Xbox would be a complete waste of my money. Maybe it isn't for you, I don't know. I don't care where Sega publishes their stuff. If they don't publish it for a platform I have, I won't buy it. *shrugs* Hell, if Microsoft bought off every major gaming franchise as an Xbox exclusive I have enough games in my house that I haven't played more then 10 minutes of to last me the rest of my life, never mind games that I just haven't beaten yet.
How do we sustain a cyber perimeter that encompasses multiple continents?
What perimeter?
More like the current state of Sega...
Everyone else is at least acclimated to the chaos and uncertainty. Sega is floundering, trying to find its way without hardware to sell.
Target audience had nothing to do with it. It's all about the Benjamins. Dinero. Cashola.
Microsoft paid Sega to bring most of it's Dreamcast franchises over to the Xbox, and didn't care much about target market. They just wanted games on the shelves, and Sega needed the cash, so they said sure. I almost bought an Xbox for JSRF, but after playing it on a friend's Xbox, I'm glad I didn't. I was pissed as hell when Sega pulled Shenmue 2 out of the US DC release schedule because MS paid them off. Shenmue was the reason I bought the DC. Sega fell over themselves claiming that it would be released in the US, and at the last minute pulled it. So they can release or not release Shenmue 3 wherever, 'cause I couldn't care less. I tossed my copy of the first one in the trash, not even bothering to finish it. Waste of time since I'll never know the end of the story.
I'm more than well aware of the people who believe that role-playing is some pure, unsullied ideal which everyone who plays these games must aspire to. I deal with them far too often, and wish they would find this role-playing nirvana they're after so they can leave me the hell alone. However, I think most of these people would be better served taking acting lessons than playing games.
Role-playing games are not the same as acting. Some of them get a good approximation thereof (like Mind's Eye Theatre stuff from White Wolf and a hard-nosed DM on a Neverwinter persistent world) but what your looking for is over there with all the theatre majors. Final Fantasy VII isn't an acting game, it's a role-playing game. The term has come to define that style of game, and all kinds of variations on the theme, but acting ain't a part of it. Most MMORPGs that have ever been are just the same kind of thing with you able to talk with tons of other people and interact with their versions of Cloud Strife, Tifa, Cid, or whomever. Frankly, Warcraft 3, Shogun: Total War, Quake, Half Life, and just about any other non-puzzle game in existance is as much an acting game as Everquest, Baldur's Gate, or any other so-called "role-playing" game.
I actually like acting, but a game is at best a mediocre stage, and online gaming is the worst of the lot. There are people who have a blast doing it, and more power to them, but acting like the rest of us are ruining your performance is sad.
Dark Age of Camelot has servers specifically set aside for those who wish a complete in-character experience. The most populated of them is the single most populous server in the game, and there are two others that are middle and low population respectively, not because they've made it that way, they just are.
The roleplaying servers are watched over in a pretty draconian fasion by the CSRs and a lot of players on those servers will appeal every little thing they find inappropriate in public chat, or name choice, keeping those CSRs quite busy with name changes/etc.
Me, I don't play on them, because I find the whole idea to be pretty ludicrous, but I'm glad there's a place like that for people who enjoy it to do it without butting heads with the rest of us, as happened on the cooperative server (which I play on exclusively now) right after it was launched.
I completely agree. I wasn't actually disagreeing with any of that.
I was merely addressing the claim made in the parent (and what a lot of people all over seem to think) that reviewers just never give bad reviews for anything.
Well, I wouldn't say that they NEVER do anything but praise games. One quick look through IGN, Gamespot, or even Gamespy will show you several games that didn't make the reviewer's grade. However, the problem is that it appears how big the marketing blitz for a game is directly affects the ratings these games are given. I present this as an example of what I mean:
bad game + huge marketing blitz= mediocre rating
same bad game + medium marketing = good rating
same bad game + no or little marketing = Worst Game Ever
mediocre game + huge marketing blitz = Best Game So Far This Year
mediocre game + medium marketing = good rating
mediocre game + no or little marketing = mediocre rating
good game + huge marketing blitz = Game of the Year Candidate
good game + medium marketing = Don't ignore this one
good game + no or little marketing = Sleeper Hit
What this all boils down to is that I don't believe the game review business has degenerated to the point that you cannot get a good review unless you've paid for one. I can't think of more than a handful of instances where I've seen an unambiguously good game get a poor review where the reviewer actually played the game. What appears to be the case so far is that you can improve your game's rating by spending a lot of money "on the reviewers". Interviews, junkets, free games, hell maybe actual cash for an improved rating. All part of the marketing blitz, I would imagine. Try to market the game so people look past the flaws they wouldn't look past otherwise. Like, say, the major flaws in SWG which everyone passes off as minor, I can only imagine because they've had so much marketing money spent on them.
The "console war" propaganda has been mostly fed by gamer news sites, and propagated by sites like news.com who don't really know better. The Great Console War is frankly a figment of the gaming rags wanting something to make noise about to sell ads. It's the perfect excuse for it.
Yes, there is competition. Yes, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are fiercely competing for all the console sales they can get. However, the kind of vitriol that ordinary gamers throw about on the whole thing just doesn't come up on it's own, and I don't ever remember Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft talking up this competition NEARLY as much as the gaming websites and magazines have, completely on their own. They're the ones that have polls/forums where you're encoraged to sound off about why you think the makers of Console X, Y, and Z are complete and utter losers, and their mothers are idiots for not killing them at birth, and anyone who buys console X, Y, or Z should just be put out of their misery because they don't have a dman clue.
Those opinions and the fact that the number of people playing AC2 is less that was expected could be reasons to need less servers, but the main two reason were stated above.
Both of the reasons you stated above have everything to do with the fact that it's a hideously unpopular MMORPG. If the game was at all popular, they wouldn't need to get rid of OVER HALF of the servers in order to have increased interactivity and better server populations.
Also, if there were actually people playing this game, the cost of running the servers wouldn't be the issue. See: Dark Age of Camelot, which has 20 servers running, and only one of those is slated to be decomissioned any time soon (there are two PvP servers, and the popularity of them has declined severely, so one is going away). They don't have an economic problem keeping five times the number of servers Asheron's Call 2 will soon be running, now do they?
And yes, Personal opinions of the game DO factor into the decision to consolidate, because the personal opinions of gamers are what is resulting in hardly anyone playing the game.
I personally believe if this debate is not stated more clearly and in a broder context of these few products we see on the market the later systems we fear will be in place before we have a voice to do anything about them.
That assumes that we have a voice in stopping it now. There is literally no way outside of getting laws passed to stop anyone from doing this. "Privacy concerns" are not "privacy laws". Governments don't want privacy because it lessens the control they have over their people. While a few bones may be thrown out to keep people looking elsewhere, there have been ZERO hard privacy gains since this whole issue has come to the forefront. Terrorism, corporate dominance over government (to a lesser extent in Europe) and the general fear that has gripped most of the world these days are eating away at privacy, and nothing will be done about it. People who care about their privacy are in the minority. Maybe if everyone isn't at each other's throats some time in the future (not likely) we might get some gains, but I can't see a damn thing changing for a long time.
Get used to it, or get used to complaining for the rest of your life about it.
In each one of those cases, you are not the victim of a crime. The person they are impersonating, or who's computers they are using without authorization are.
They send mail via one or more systems that are used as proxies, without their prior consent
If they have open proxies/relays, then they are arguably implicity allowing anyone to use them without prior authorization. If they hacked the relay, that's another matter. Either way, no crime is committed against the reciever of the spam, and it is soley the proxy/relay owner's responsibility to press charges.
They use sender addresses that do not belong to them, but to other people
IANAL, so I don't know if you can sue someone who wrote someone else's return address on mail they send you. Perhaps fraud. Either way, it's the fraud that's the crime, not sending spam. And even then, I'm not sure any laws applying to postal fraud even cover e-mail use.
They advertise websites that they do not host themselves, but have put on hacked machines or they use hacked machines as proxies
Again, this is a crime against the owners of the hacked machines, not you, the reciever of spam directed at those machines.
This means they are not inventive users of the system as it is designed, but abusers that use false identities.
I agree. However, making the owners of open proxies and mail relays aware of what they are allowing people do do with their machines and trying to get them to close them up, securing the machines they attempt to subvert illegally, and prosecuting them for computer intrusion and identity theft is what should be done. Not stopping unsolicited advertisements.
When you get your cable service you have nothing to say about the ads, but when some person cuts away the programme and starts transmitting his porn or other abusive material, under the station logo of a known station or listing your name on the screen, you have some base for complaining.
Sure you can complain, but YOU don't have the right to sue over it. The station that's being impersonated does. The only real control you have is to call your cable provider and cancel the service because the channels they provide or the cable provider themselves are doing a good enough job for you.
Unless you change the law to allow me to prosecute someone for a crime committed against someone else. Of course, that is when I excercise my right to complain by leaving for a more sane country, or go build myself a cabin in the wilderness if no country doesn't do something so stupid.
...but I won't be able to stop myself.
Silent Hill 2 freaked the everloving bejeezus right out of me, down the road, and off into some inconspicuous bushes to hide from the bad plastic coated zombie men scraping their exposed leg bones on the pavement somewhere out there in the blackness.
I do not want to play Silent Hill 3. However, I will be there on Aug 6 with my debit card, trying to hold my friend back from the game store dorr as he tries to hold me back from the self-same door. But we won't succeed.
I paid under $30 for it, and I'm enjoying it a lot. Patience. The price will drop, either new or used, eventually. I waited a LONG time for .hack//Infection to drop in price and thought it wasn't ever going to. Now it's $30 new, and I'm going to be able to pick it up for less than that used.
If you want bounty hunting, try EVE: The Second Genesis. It's not exactly a Star Wars substitute (no jedi, and you're in your ship all the time) but you certainly can put bounties on people and take those missions up for others. And the area you have to hunt them in is FAR larger than what SWG lets you play in.
It's not an RPG (more like Freelancer or Escape Velocity online) and there's undoubtably tedium if you do a lot of mining/industrial/courier work past the initial ramp-up to getting a decent ship, but bounty hunting/pirate hunting can be harrowing. At least something to look into.
The people I know who play it certainly just play it because it's Star Wars and for no other reason. That kind of "loyalty" can only last so long, though. That, and Star Wars games are almost universally awful, so a game that is merely OK is worlds better than say, Force Commander, to pick a random example.
How do you ruin something that was already crap?
The US has, in the past, threatened to walk out of international talks because other participants refused to consider the implementation of DMCA-esque laws.
To which I wonder why anyone cares if they believe the US only wants to increase their dominance through those talks? I should think further isolating America would serve the purpose of European politicians quite satisfactorily.
I write this as a fervent anti-USA fanboy, because I don't like what your country does (promote horrid fast-food chains, promote dumb commercial television/channels, spread the belief that once you have a lot of money it doesn't matter how you got it, and overpromoted godawfull pop-music).
Last I checked the US government doesn't come over to a European nation with an armored brigade and force people at gunpoint to go into McDonalds, buy Coke, watch American-style TV, or make people buy music they don't want to hear. You'll need to have a chat with your fellow citizens about that, as they wouldn't eat the food, buy the drinks, watch the TV/movies, or buy the music unless THEY WANTED TO. Hell, even in hideously authoritarian countries with dictators supported by America, if they're allowed to have music, you're generally not seeing press gangs out there pushing people into record stores and making them buy Britney Spears albums instead of saintly local "artists". If your fellow citizens didn't want all the cultural shit we make available, they wouldn't buy it. While I may not like most of it myself, I have no sympathy for those who buy into the obviously fake American lifestyle our corporations are selling. It's your damage for buying it. The last thing the world needs is a War on American Culture to compete for Dumbest Thing Ever with America's own War on Drugs.
And greed isn't an American export. Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, all have that down pat. What, you just jealous that America is better at being greedy than you are? Suit yourself.
And luckily the framers didn't classify protected speech as merely political dissent, or else the USA would be in far worse trouble than it is.
Well, if UCE costs you money, you need to either work on making the practice illegal (which I don't care one way or the other about) or failing that, decide whether the financial cost you bring upon yourself by using the international e-mail system is worth the benefits you recieve from it.
It is NOT theft of service for you to recieve an e-mail you didn't request. It is a symptom of the system working exactly as originally designed. The e-mail system has the automatic and unquestioned acceptance of all messaging as it's fatal flaw. It is part of the deal. It's what allows you to send e-mail to your long lost friend that didn't know your e-mail address, or to e-mail some customer support service at Amazon or what not, or e-mail your family to let them know you're OK after surviving the Twin Towers disaster, or whatever. That's what it was designed to do. It has strengths and glaring weaknesses, and when you participate in the system, you are willingly putting yourself at the mercy those weaknesses. If someone sends you a truckload of stuff you don't want through your e-mail service, and you pay by the byte for downloading it, your service is no more being stolen than a zillion people hitting a website where they pay by the byte for traffic, because the service is functioning the way it was designed. If you couldn't afford all that, you shouldn't have signed up for a per-byte Internet service. If you want to avoid the pitfalls of e-mail you need to find or make yourself a service that doesn't have this particular fatal flaw. That, or keep working to make the practice illegal wherever you are, which patches a technical hole with a legal or political tub of spackle. However, unless they invade another person's equipment to send the UCE to you, they aren't committing any kind of crime by doing it, at least in the USA. And even if they do that, you aren't the one who's having the crime committed against them, unless it was your machine they used as the relay.
Here's a decent example...
I don't have cable television service because I have decided that I hate the flood of ads and other comercial idiocy far more than what I would use it for is worth. I could have rigged up a TIVO or ReplayTV or some other one of the myriad solutions out there for removing ads, if I wanted to, but I decided the hassle wasn't worth the cost. Just because I don't want the ads there, doesn't mean I have a leg to stand on demanding that they not be there. I can take measures to remove them or avoid them, and any cost I incur because of those measures is COMPLETELY MY FAULT. Same with UCE. If I don't like it, I either run a spam blocker of some ilk, take great pains to never give out my e-mail address to someone I don't trust completely with it, learn to deal with it, or chuck e-mail entirely. If I decide to do any of those things, I've only myself to blame for the inconvenience/cost associated with them, because it isn't theft for spammers to use the service the way it was designed.
So basically, you can send the invoice to whomever you damn well please, and it'll probably get deleted, ignored, or cause someone to bust a blood vessel at the gall of some idiot on the Internet who thinks he can send bills to whomever he thinks deserves to pay for his problems.
Call up your local post office and tell them you want to refuse all fourth class mail.
That will get rid of the majority of your postal problem.