It seems kind of weird that they'd target Apple....
Apple may be the "least bad" of the lot, but they're certainly the highest profile. If the point is to get publicity for the anti-DRM cause, protesting high visibility cases is a better idea than protesting low visibility cases.
Certainly there is a question here between "liberty" and "essential liberty"
If only our founding fathers gave us some sort of guidance, maybe a selection of things so essential that they'd make some sort of "Top Ten" list in language so simple that the core ideas could not be confused. A group of highlights so important that they could be held forth as fundamental to the character of our country. Yeah, that should would have been nice. Ah, well. I guess in the we're stuck debating if the right to be secure from unreasonable searches is an essential liberty.
If you want to know why videogames became the Bogeyman, you only have to look at adolescent idiocies like Hot Coffee and Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
id you actually pay attention to Hot Coffee or SCMR? Hot Coffee required players to download and install a mod, the content was not available to players who simply purchased and played the game. There was no "cheat code" you could enter to get the content. SCMR was an attempt at serious social commentary, it emphasized imagry the killer's deaths, as well as imagry of the mourning families of those slain. It specifically didn't show images of those murdered.
Congrats: you've bought into the misinformation. You've passed judgement on things you didn't know and erroneously concluded that some unusual outliers are worth focusing on.
It is the handful of games from the handful of publishers we all know are aiming for the flashpoint.
Completely unlike people who create books, comic books, film, music, or movies aiming for the flashpoint. We got over our irrational fear these other forms of media, this too shall pass. These days if someone makes an offensive movie or publishes an offensive book, the specific work is criticized, but people manage to avoid running around blaming the medium for the message.
I was raised Catholic. My entire pre-college education was at Catholic parochial schools. Catholicism may no longer be my faith, but I have a solid grounding in the religion and continue to respect it.
We are continually vilified in the media; you probably haven't noticed it simply because its so common.
Hardly. The church got a string of bad news when the pedophilia cases became public, but the evidence strongly suggests that a number of bishops made terribly wrong decisions. Beyond that, what? Hell, when Sinead O'Conner tore up a picture of the Pope, there was nearly universal condemnation of simple free speech. You get occasional bad news, but mostly it gets ignored. There is some real hate speech (See: Chick Publications), but compared to the hate speech against Islam it's trivial.
Our spiritual leader, the Pope, is criticised no matter what he does...
The Pope is a public figure by choice, he's going to get criticism. Indeed, as Pope it's his duty to speak on matters he believes to be true and important. He should count himself lucky that he is the single most widely covered religious figure on the planet. On the down side it means he gets a lot of criticism, but on the up side it means he gets far more opportunities to share his message. It's like complaining that President Clinton/Bush is criticised no matter what they do. Of course, it's the result of being a public figure bold enough to try controversial things.
When the Pope quotes a 14th C. predecessor's criticism of Islam and the men who follow its precepts,
(To be clear: those who engaged in murder, arson, and vandalism in response to these statements were completely in the wrong. Those responses are always the wrong response to speech you disagree with. But that's irrelevant to my point.)
And you wonder why the Pope gets a bad rap? When you say that the only news things Muhammad brought were "evil and inhuman," expect to get some flak for it. "I was just quoting someone else" isn't a defense, at least not unless the original remarks were prefixed with "As an example of something I completely disagree with..."
Feel free to suggest that Christianity is based around the hatred of Muslims (or any other faith); you would be wrong. The converse may, however, be true.
How open minded of you. You bitch that others misrepresent your faith through ignorance, then go on to ignorantly misrepresent other faiths. Islam is no more based around a hatred of Christianity than Christianity is based around a hatred of Judiasm. In both cases the newer religion's basis is that the previous religion was originally founded on good idea, but the people strayed and got confused, so God sent yet another person down to try and clairify things. True, some Muslims take this to the conclusion that Christians are to be loathed, but for much of Christianity's history Jews were similarly hated.
Christ, what about this article is drawing out the trolls?
This is not "how Free Software dies." Yes, if you want certain guarantees like deadlines met, particular features added, or particular bugs quashed, yeah, being able to pay someone helps. But was this not true for the last 21 years? Yet somehow we ended up with Linux, Perl, Apache, the GIMP, Gnome, KDE, Konqueror and more. Some projects stumbling doesn't mean the whole thing is doomed. And sometimes projects hire people not because no one will work on the hard parts, but because they want someone to be able to dedicate more of their time so thing can progress faster.
Free Software isn't going anywhere. Indeed, that Free Software has been adopted by commercial endeavors like Red Hat, Novell, IBM, and Apple is just a further sign of its success. They're building great things on the foundations provided that that "quaint social experiment."
Perhaps a point could be made that community build software doesn't scale well, that it is bad at providing the unity necessary to ship a full distribution. But that's not the conclusion you came to. You concluded "This is how Free Software dies." That's silly.
You want stability? If Gentoo is as problematic as you claim, maybe you should move to a more mainstream, boring distribution. Debian's stable release isn't very exciting, but it has a good reputation for stability. Same goes for the various Red Hat repackages like CentOS. If you don't like the free support, check out what other distros offer; I hear good stuff about Ubuntu's community. If you want more certain support, go pay for a distribution like Red Hat and cough up for the support contract.
This is not an problem with Open Source, this is a problem with Gentoo. The other option is going to demand that you pay them, why not pay for support for OSS?
In the non-free world you don't see Microsoft telling it's customers "You don't like explorer? Fix it yourself!"
Indeed. Microsoft's answer is "You don't like explorer? Sucks to be you!"
My post roughly followed the order of the original article.
On page one the author definately suggested that risk is good,
and that current common risks are money, increased difficulty,
having to restart the game, and time. He then goes on to blow
off wasting time as "not a real risk". After ignoring that
restarting the game directly translates into wasting time, and
increased difficulty indirectly does he goes on to spend the rest
of the article bashing washing time. The implication is that the
other three risks are reasonable risks.
Your "practice" is my "curse you, lazy game
developer". If I am unable to complete a section within about 20
tries, I'm done with a game (less if the section is very long,
say more than 15 minutes).
That's a matter of game balance, possibly in the form of
automatic difficulty adjustment, alternate paths, or user
controlled difficulty. I agree, it's a rare game I'm willing
to retry a section 20 times for. But I think it's reasonable to
expect players to occasionally replay sections a few times. It
provides risk, simultaneously provides practice, and so long as
the player succeeds before getting frustated provides a real
sense of accomplishment.
The author also posits, in the closing footnotes, that an alternate option is
available.
That is, worse players get less play time and get bad ending,
while good players play more and get good ending.
It's pretty clear that the author dislikes that proposal, as
do I. I doesn't reward skill, it rewards grinding. It's the
sloppy solution some games use to claim "replayability." It's
one of the reasons I find much of the console RPG genre
frustrating.
I would even go so far as to say that the high risk
path should be more exciting, and offer the best
content.
I can see the reviews now. "If you really good at this type
of game, it's amazing. If you suck, but still enjoy it, you're
in for a snorefest." After complaining about games that make you
retry 20 times, you're offering less skilled players the exact
same option. "Retry the harder, higher risk option until you
succeed, or get a worse game. Want to see the best setpieces and setups, you're going to be retrying over, and over, and over.
Low skill players aren't just playing because they want to get
to the end. They play for the same reason that more skilled
players do: the game is inherently enjoyable. It seems like a bad idea to take the best of a game away from them because they lack the skills. Indeed, those very skills would best be honed by giving them challenging but still enjoyable games that they can finish.
In an ideal world what you suggest would be true, but we don't live in an ideal world.
At the moment CS degrees provide the required breadth and earn the respect of potential employers. IT and IS degrees aren't yet ready, if only because they don't get the respect. So for today, someone who wants to be a programmer is best served by a CS degree.
I'm not arguing that CS shouldn't have a math and proof background. I'm not suggesting that you don't need math, I'm suggesting that the requirements for math are often too high. I got my BS in CS from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I now work there on a research project. (Obviously I speak only for myself, not my employer.) I'm friends with a number of people who are seeking or have received MS or PhDs from the UW-Madison. Most of them agree: third semester calculus was a waste of their time. Many (myself included) just barely squeeked through, then prompted forgot the lot of it. I certainly never used it in getting my BS. My SO never used it while getting her MS. If you can get a Masters degree without needing to use one of the degree's prerequisites at all, it's probably a poor prerequisite.
CS is a broad field, coving cryptography, computer vision, computer graphics, networking, file systems, scheduling, distributed computing, databases, user interface design, programming language design, security, instrumentation, and more. Many of those fields of research simply don't need advanced math. You can engage in cutting edge research in, say, database work, or instrumentation, or distributed computing without ever dipping into calculus.
I've known multiple people who have the skills and knowledge to get a CS BS but they couldn't get the degree because the math requirement was too hard. If the math requirements never tie into the majority of courses, it's a bogus requirement. For those courses where you really need the advanced math, just make it a prereq for the course. Those people who want to focus on the mathematical side of CS will self-select; to an extent they already do.
If you want a vocation, go to a community college or something else.
I hear this repeatedly suggested. For most would-be programmers it's terrible advice. You might as well tell would be doctors, "If you just want to heal people, go to a community college. Universities are about education."
As you say, the result of a solid CS education is general theory and skills that you can adapt to a wide variety of situations. If you want jobs more interesting than writing yet another VB frontend to Access you'll need that grounding.
There are valid complaints about poorly focused CS programs with unreasonable math requirements. Yes, some CS work requires a solid grounding in advanced math. Most doesn't. You don't need 3 semesters of calculus to be able to reason about O() notation. Low level matrix math courses and perhaps statistics are more generally useful, but neither one has a calculus prereq. Unlike the grandparent, schools with these unreasonable requirements aren't afraid of vocational training, it's just historical. Many CS departments came out of mathematics departments and the link still lingers. CS majors do need some math to reason about CS, but not as much as many CS departments demand.
Brin's point is a bit muddled, but I think the idea is that modern scripting languages that seem like the logical replacement suffer from being too smart, too high level. Basic as shipped on many early home computers had the advantage of being relatively stupid. Sure, it was high level compared to assembly or even C, but it typically came with almost nothing in the way of supporting libraries. Modern scripting languages come with huge numbers of useful libraries. As a developer I love them; I spend less time reimplementing the wheel and more time solving new problems. But as a beginner these libraries can be a crutch.
I'm torn. On one hand, we're talking about kids. 25 years ago a simple text game was still cool, it was enough to inspire a child. Today, good luck. Newer, richer languages allow a child to create something interesting by modern standards.
On the other hand, your average kid is never exposed to the more primitive way of programming. It's the crude equivalent of making children learn to do division long hand before you let them use calculators. You've hidden some of the complexity, so the kids don't respect it as much. If a line of code and some clicking displays a graph, it's less impressive than having to type in all the code to display the graph. For those kids interested in computer programming, you might have set up false expectations. While by and large programmers work at a high level, you do need to understand what's going on under the hood. If you don't you won't be able to fix it when it breaks, or adjust your code to compensate. I'd hate to see a generation of potentional programmers all excited that they made a game using some game creation system, get to college and be hit with the low level stuff that seems completely unrelated to what they're doing, then drop out. Early exposure to the low level guts might chase off some kids who really don't have it in their hearts, while giving the interested ones a more realistic view of the complexity of programming.
What in the world are you talking about? Good object oriented design and development hardly requires you to be a math geek or have an appreciation of calculus or set theory. (Functional programming; maybe...:-) The core of good OO design is just breaking concepts into logical groups. It's a formalization of ideas that logically flowed out of procedural programming. Most mainstream procedural languages had picked up OO programming practices, if not the terminology, a long time ago. The many C functions that take a FILE*? The FILE* is just an object and the various functions that take it just methods. The Win32 API hands you an HWND to represent a window, and you pass that HWND into many, many other functions to work with it? Another object. There is no significant distinction between fprintf(stderr, "Hello world") and the hypothetical stderr.printf("Hello World").
If you're writing non-trivial, well organized procedural code, you've got some code organized along OO lines.
For many of these languages it's not like you're tied into the OO model. C++, Perl, and many other languages specifically bless saying, "screw it, plain old procedural programming will be the most expressive solution for this." But if you end up with an OO design, which you almost certainally occasionally do, the language gives you more support. Your refusal to seriously look at object oriented languages is just a refusal to consider that perhaps there is more than one tool in the programming toolbox.
As to how verbose OO languages are, that's an artifact of particular languages. You and I have written freaking COBOL! That's hardly a terse, efficient language. Some OO focused languages (C++) tend to be more verbose. Various languages have varying levels of verbosity.
As for Perl being taken over by academics, utter nonsense. Perl is about freedom of choice, about having access to a large number of tools so you have just the right tool for any given job. If you feel a procedural solution is the best one, Perl agrees. Did you want an object oriented solution? Perl's game to try. Functional? Perl's up for that. The Perl 6 work is trying to make Perl more unified and to strengthen the OO support. Indeed, OO support in Perl 5 is really a bolt-on job; Perl 6 promises to be easier to use, less clunky and verbose OO support. And if you don't like it, well, no one will force you to use it.
He's seriously advocating that it's reasonable that if you fail at a risk in the game, the game should become harder. A valid idea for some short-length games, like a PvP game of Quake or Starcraft, but insane for longer and especially single player games. That sort of stupid game design is why many people bounce on the quick save key every five minutes. To take the most common example, mainstream first person shooter design. "Oh, you easily blew through the level with lots of ammo and health left over? Okay, as a reward you start the next, harder level with all that ammo and health. Oh, you barely scraped through with almost not ammo or health? As punishment you advance to the next, harder level at death's door." Punish the less skilled players, reward the more skilled ones. In practice this means less skilled players rely on saves and restores, effectively changing it into the time tradeoff the author so dislikes. If you really want to go this route you need to take control of saving away from the player. When you do you change the price of failure for a weaker player from "wasted time reloading" to "restarting the game from scratch because I can't compensate for my earlier failure." There is a market for such games (see Diablo II in hardcore mode, or Nethack), but it's a small, small market. If you want to only discuss game design for hard core players, so be it, but say so up front; don't pretend you're making general statements.
The author then dismisses having to replay sections of the game as "not really risk." The air get thin in your ivory tower? Doesn't he get frustrated and angry when he fails at something in a game? There is emotional risk, perhaps the strongest connection any game developer gets to a player. The player is also risking time. Money is apparently a "real" risk in the author's mind, but he forgotten the old cliche: time is money. If someone has to replay an hour of game content, even for people making minimum wage that amounts to a $5.70 financial penalty. Add in the opportunity cost of something more fun the player could be doing instead and even just about any player is paying a large fine for failure.
In addition, replaying sections of the game isn't just punishment. In many (admitted, not all), replaying a section you failed is practice. The author bashs Ico. Yes, you only get one path at a time in Ico, you're forced to replay a section until you beat it. Those failed attempts are called "practice." Indeed, it's far better than directly charging me money for each attempt, or making the game harder as punishment. When I fail the practice improves my skills in general, improving my odds in later sections.
So what solution does the author offer? "Write huge amounts of content, let the skilled players blow through it quickly and not see most of it, and let the weaker players soak it all in and." A nice idea in theory, but for most games not practical. This means you'll need to vastly increase your budget to support all this content. You'll then have the skilled players (which include many professional reviewers) either blow through it quickly and complain there wasn't much content for their money, or play it slowly and complain it's too easy. Either way you get bad reviews.
Ultimately he's suggesting, "Now that your time's a wager that whole system becomes a lot more fun." The exact same thing he dismissed as irrelevant on page 1 is suddenly great. He's still talking about punishing weaker players by costing them time (which is still money). Perhaps all the additional content will make that additional time actively entertaining. In that case, won't the skilled players be frustrated at missing all that entertaining content, or be frustrated that to see all the entertaining content they need to engage in dull gamep
Techies are just as mistrusting, and that mistrust is warranted. Maybe google.com doesn't go down, but my broadband does occasionally go down, which is effectivally identical to google.com being down for me. My job (a major university with multiple connections to different providers) has an outage perhaps once a year. Ignoring full outages, minor hiccups cause things like Google Spreadsheets to occasionally pop up the "Warning: You have been disconnected and your data has not been saved" message. Meanwhile, given the rapid rise and fall of services, do you really trust a given service to be there tomorrow? Google's not going anywhere, but is UberWebSpreadsheet3000 going to be there tomorrow? Anyone who thinks major service providers don't have outages should check Netcraft's coverage. If MySpace and Wikipedia, can be taken out by a power outage, so can lots of mid-size providers. If for-pay companies like Final Fantasy XI's game servers, online payment site StormPay, or domain registrar Joker's DNS servers can be taken down by DDOS, so can lots of other online businesses for which people pay for reliable access.
A bit of mistrust in online services, especially if you rely on that service, seems like the prudent thing to do.
Ok, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't such a system keep a master table of every vote that was recorded, at what time, on what electronic ballot, what location, and by whom?
We have secret elections for a number of important reasons. One of the most important is that your vote can't be used against you. There are a lot of people who would like to be able to see how you voted and would buy an illegal copy of the database you propose. A crooked politician might use voting records of people whose votes he should work to suppress. An amoral employer might fire employees who didn't vote as the employer wanted. The stereotypical example is that thanks to a secret ballot, if a deeply crooked politician hired thugs to intimidate voters, the voters could vote for his opponent, then lie about who they voted for to protect themselves from the thugs. I doubt this happens in the US, but it's probably a very real concern in Iraq.
Of the games you've listed, only one (Don't Rest Your Head) came out in 2006. It's hardly news for nerds.
If you're expecting Slashdot to become the shining beacon that highlights cutting edge indy RPG game design, well, you're a dreamer, I can respect that. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Compared to the front page of Slashdot, Games.Slashdot is small site. Compared to the normal video game focus of Games.Slashdot, tabletop RPGs are a microscopic market. To focus on the very small subset of indie games would lose even more readers.
I applaud your enthusiasm, but don't get your hopes quite so high. There is no renaissance. Worse, things are looking a little dark; the d20 boom has faded. The number of people making a living in the industry is going down. Profitable companies are going out of business or relying on donations to survive. Sales are down. Local hobby stores continue to close. If there is a historical analogy, you might compare it to the dark ages, except instead of turning to superstition and faith, they're turning to computer RPGs and Wizards of the Coast. Or maybe the fall of Rome; the once great society crumbling under it's own hubris, inability to adjust, and a bit of help from the barbarians of video games.
What you're describing is a nascent indie movement, largely pushed by The Forge. I'm glad it's out there. There is great stuff being done, including the games you mentioned. Experimental stuff has been happening since role-playing games were first created, but it does seem like the rate's increasing. If the RPG industry ends up a shadow of its former self, it's the indies who will provide much of the spark and drive that will keep it alive. This is what kept interactive fiction and hex-and-chit wargaming not only alive, but innovative. If the RPG industry doesn't fade away, the indies will provide the experimental, cutting edge stuff that the main industry will take years to adopt, a counterpart to the indie film scene, the sort of think Greg Costiyan is trying to push in video games with Manifesto Games.
A story on detecting photomanipulation apparently wasn't interesting in and of itself, so the author felt the need to drag in one of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: "Child pornographers also employ photo retouching to skirt felony laws."
No amount of photo retouching makes sexual abuse of a child legal. The only way I can see to "skirt" the law would be to transform the images so they plausible look artificial (Court rulings have upheld that as long as no children are involved, it's protected by the first amendment. Thus drawings, paintings, and 3-d models depicting child abuse are legal). Of course, if you're going to transform the image that much, you can legally get artificial images that look that way in the first place. Perhaps there are a few cases where this has been done, but I'm not buying that this is a real problem.
Given that the "article" is pretty much a summary designed to convince people to pay for their full research, it's embarassing. Learn to use your graphing software. And perhaps more importantly: don't connect discrete data points with lines. What am I supposed to make of the line between "Social Gamer" and "Dormant Gamer"? That there are hybrids who constitute about 18% of the market? That there are not hybrid Power/Dormant gamers?
You're complaining that he's tell the bad guys the secret flaws of the security system? You realize you're arguing for security through obscurity? While security through obscurity does provide some security, it's not a replacement for real security. The bad guys might already have the information. One might be working for the company, or have bribed or blackmailed an employee at the company. In that case the vulnerability would already be known by the bad guys, but Lockheed can pretend things are still safe. At least through full disclosure it's now a known problem. People working these ships can compensate. Lockheed might modify the ships to improve the security. These are far better improvements to hoping the bad guys don't know about the vulnerability.
Assuming this guy is sincere, he's tried the official channels for fixing this. The official channels didn't listen. He's seriously concerned for the safety of the Coast Guard. If he believes there is a real security problem and that official channels don't care, he'd be doing the wrong thing if he just kept silent.
Your group must have been gaming in a cave if White Wolf's Storyteller (1991) system with its lack of classes was so surprising. Skill based, classless systems had exists for over a decade at that point, including well known systems Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing System in Call of Cthulhu (1981), Hero Game's Hero System in Champions (1981), and Iron Crowne's Rolemaster (~1980). By the time Storyteller showed up, classless gameplay continued in games like Steve Jackson's GURPS (1986) and Mayfair's Mayfair Exponential Game System in DC Heroes (1985).
Furthermore, it's not a clear case of "classless with skills is better than classes." D&D remains the most popular RPG in the United States; these aren't millions of players who are simply ignorant of classless systems. Classless systems have existed for almost 25 years and are widely available. For many younger player, classless games have existed since they were born. Yet they play D&D.
Class based systems provide some advantages, in particular it provides guidance. Builting a character from absolutely nothing can be daunting; while many enjoy it, it can be hard to craft a character that fits well into the expectations of the game. In first edition D&D you would be hard pressed to design a character ill-suited for the D&D-style play, while in Vampire it's pretty easy to do so, possibly by accident.
Of course, guidance don't need to come from strict classes. In particular, many games now provide "archetypes", archtypical characters which players can use as a basis. For example, Shadowrun's Street Samurai, Mages, and Deckers; or Cyberpunk's Glitterboys and Reporters, or Big Eyes, Small Mouth's Gun Bunny's, Magical Girls, and Mecha. I find it telling that in many games with lots of character freedom, they still tend to neatly fit within the archetypes because they fit the game well.
It's also interesting that many games eliminated "classes" that represented training or profession, but kept some sort of rigid grouping that limits characters, especially new characters. This is true of most of White Wolf's products in which characters are sorted into Clans, Tribes, Kiths, and Traditions, all of which impact a player's choices at start up.
Also, you're completely missing why MMORPG's have classes: balance issues. MMORPGs are up against very different problems than tabletop games. In a tabletop game, if you make poor choices early in the game that limit your character later in the game, be it role-playing or mechanics, things can be tweaked. In a MMORPG, a poor selection of skills early in the game may lock you out of further advancement, meaning many more hours retraining or building up a new character. They is less of a problem for players interested in gaming that part of the system, or players willing to do lots of online research up front, but it's bad for casual players. Classes also make design easier. Given the complexity of MMORPG design, "easier" may mean "feasible." Many games designs want to create interesting mixes of player characters with different focuses. In a pure skill based system you are more likely to end up with a bland mix optimized in a small number of ways. This is tied into the poor skill choice issue: you might optimize in a way that seems cool ("I want to be the best fire mage possible") only to discover that no one wants you in their group because it turns out that the fire-mage/healer hybrid is far more efficient. While classes force you to sacrifice flexibility, it means you can better ensure that the remaining selections are more evenly attractive and playable.
Ultimately the line between class-based and class-less is a continuum, one of many. Few games exist perfectly at either end. There is no single answer for all games, tabletop or online. Game designers should reconsider the issue with each new game.
I can save and restart, allowing me to replay the same sections of the game over and over until I'm powerful enough to advance? That's not an innovation. At best it's a weird loophole allowing those willing to restart and restart and restart to get an edge. At worst it's an old friend in new clothes: grinding. I got tired of grinding with the original Dragon Warrior.
As for the ability to simply ignore the main plotline and go do the other stuff, it seems sucky that you have to pick one or the other. Maybe some things (like the Zombie Genocide) should require you to make an either or decision, but why force the player to make that decision for lesser side-expeditions like rescuing civilians? Many gamers will focus on the primary plotline, feel frustrated that they failed so many side quests, finish the game, then be done.
These aren't misunderstood features, this is simply bad game design.
And how was the child porn and hate propaganda suspicions tied to an iPod in the toilet, exactly?
That little bit irritated me as well, but I believe at border crossings you sacrifice most of your rights to privacy and freedom from search. If you don't want to be subject to arbitrary searches, the answer is "don't enter our country." The people policing the border have a fair amount of freedom to say, "No, I don't want you in our country." While it may be misapplied (as it was in this case), ultimately you're a visitor to their country and you have no fundamental right to be admitted.
However, this does reinforce my belief that airline security is wasting a hell of a lot of money on useless things. Trolling random people's computers for porn isn't a good use of their time.
As always, those who have done nothing wrong and keep good records have nothing to fear.
While I believe laws regarding business financial records do require good records going back this far, in reality mistakes happen. And the further you get away from the mistake, the harder it is to explain. It becomes harder to defend against a charge the longer between the claimed crime and the charge; this is one of the reasons that many crimes have statutes of limitations. People and businesses shouldn't live in constant fear that five years ago they might have made a mistake for which they could be charged today.
Ultimately how far back we're willing to go in an investigation should be proportional with the accussed crime. Murder? Pretty far back. Shoplifting? Not very. Similarly for corporations? Massive fraud over many years? Go digging far back for evidence. Minor and common irregularities? We've got better things to do. Unfortunately sometimes investigators will decide they need to make a show of being Tough on (Corporate) Crime and will go on fishing expeditions to dig up anything they can, then make the biggest case they can over minor issues.
The people in question claim that these were minor irregularities, and fairly common ones. Assuming that's true, this smells of a fishing expedition and I disapprove. On the other hand, I don't know the situation well enough to know of the people making the claims are knowledgable and truthful.
Is it just me, or have "Lazy Parents" taken a number-two spot behind "Jews" on the Big List Of Convenient Scapegoats For Blaming All The Ills Of The World On?
I'd leave the whole anti-semitism thing out of the discussion. There are more people worrying about anti-semitism than actual anti-semites.
It can't be that an entire generation (present company, of course, excluded, can't use ourselves as scapegoats) has suddenly forgotten how to raise children.
In case anyone in interested in spring of 1997 I visited TSR on a business trip. This was just after the Wizard's of the Coast buyout. For the curious here's my writeup on visiting TSR during the final days in which you can hear my perception of the mood (poor, but improving since the buyout) and learn useless things (Peter Adkison really likes ketchup. And why 50th level Dwarven Paladins, an illegal combination in 2nd ed, was a major test case.).
Glancing into the windows of a car parked on public property (the street in this case) has been fair game for cops for years. It's not a search. A crude rule of thumb is: if a stranger can do so without breaking the law, a cop is equally free to do so. Looking into your car is hardly illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple may be the "least bad" of the lot, but they're certainly the highest profile. If the point is to get publicity for the anti-DRM cause, protesting high visibility cases is a better idea than protesting low visibility cases.
id you actually pay attention to Hot Coffee or SCMR? Hot Coffee required players to download and install a mod, the content was not available to players who simply purchased and played the game. There was no "cheat code" you could enter to get the content. SCMR was an attempt at serious social commentary, it emphasized imagry the killer's deaths, as well as imagry of the mourning families of those slain. It specifically didn't show images of those murdered.
Congrats: you've bought into the misinformation. You've passed judgement on things you didn't know and erroneously concluded that some unusual outliers are worth focusing on.
Completely unlike people who create books, comic books, film, music, or movies aiming for the flashpoint. We got over our irrational fear these other forms of media, this too shall pass. These days if someone makes an offensive movie or publishes an offensive book, the specific work is criticized, but people manage to avoid running around blaming the medium for the message.
I was raised Catholic. My entire pre-college education was at Catholic parochial schools. Catholicism may no longer be my faith, but I have a solid grounding in the religion and continue to respect it.
Hardly. The church got a string of bad news when the pedophilia cases became public, but the evidence strongly suggests that a number of bishops made terribly wrong decisions. Beyond that, what? Hell, when Sinead O'Conner tore up a picture of the Pope, there was nearly universal condemnation of simple free speech. You get occasional bad news, but mostly it gets ignored. There is some real hate speech (See: Chick Publications), but compared to the hate speech against Islam it's trivial.
The Pope is a public figure by choice, he's going to get criticism. Indeed, as Pope it's his duty to speak on matters he believes to be true and important. He should count himself lucky that he is the single most widely covered religious figure on the planet. On the down side it means he gets a lot of criticism, but on the up side it means he gets far more opportunities to share his message. It's like complaining that President Clinton/Bush is criticised no matter what they do. Of course, it's the result of being a public figure bold enough to try controversial things.
(To be clear: those who engaged in murder, arson, and vandalism in response to these statements were completely in the wrong. Those responses are always the wrong response to speech you disagree with. But that's irrelevant to my point.)
And you wonder why the Pope gets a bad rap? When you say that the only news things Muhammad brought were "evil and inhuman," expect to get some flak for it. "I was just quoting someone else" isn't a defense, at least not unless the original remarks were prefixed with "As an example of something I completely disagree with..."
How open minded of you. You bitch that others misrepresent your faith through ignorance, then go on to ignorantly misrepresent other faiths. Islam is no more based around a hatred of Christianity than Christianity is based around a hatred of Judiasm. In both cases the newer religion's basis is that the previous religion was originally founded on good idea, but the people strayed and got confused, so God sent yet another person down to try and clairify things. True, some Muslims take this to the conclusion that Christians are to be loathed, but for much of Christianity's history Jews were similarly hated.
Christ, what about this article is drawing out the trolls?
This is not "how Free Software dies." Yes, if you want certain guarantees like deadlines met, particular features added, or particular bugs quashed, yeah, being able to pay someone helps. But was this not true for the last 21 years? Yet somehow we ended up with Linux, Perl, Apache, the GIMP, Gnome, KDE, Konqueror and more. Some projects stumbling doesn't mean the whole thing is doomed. And sometimes projects hire people not because no one will work on the hard parts, but because they want someone to be able to dedicate more of their time so thing can progress faster.
Free Software isn't going anywhere. Indeed, that Free Software has been adopted by commercial endeavors like Red Hat, Novell, IBM, and Apple is just a further sign of its success. They're building great things on the foundations provided that that "quaint social experiment."
Perhaps a point could be made that community build software doesn't scale well, that it is bad at providing the unity necessary to ship a full distribution. But that's not the conclusion you came to. You concluded "This is how Free Software dies." That's silly.
You want stability? If Gentoo is as problematic as you claim, maybe you should move to a more mainstream, boring distribution. Debian's stable release isn't very exciting, but it has a good reputation for stability. Same goes for the various Red Hat repackages like CentOS. If you don't like the free support, check out what other distros offer; I hear good stuff about Ubuntu's community. If you want more certain support, go pay for a distribution like Red Hat and cough up for the support contract.
This is not an problem with Open Source, this is a problem with Gentoo. The other option is going to demand that you pay them, why not pay for support for OSS?
Indeed. Microsoft's answer is "You don't like explorer? Sucks to be you!"
My post roughly followed the order of the original article. On page one the author definately suggested that risk is good, and that current common risks are money, increased difficulty, having to restart the game, and time. He then goes on to blow off wasting time as "not a real risk". After ignoring that restarting the game directly translates into wasting time, and increased difficulty indirectly does he goes on to spend the rest of the article bashing washing time. The implication is that the other three risks are reasonable risks.
That's a matter of game balance, possibly in the form of automatic difficulty adjustment, alternate paths, or user controlled difficulty. I agree, it's a rare game I'm willing to retry a section 20 times for. But I think it's reasonable to expect players to occasionally replay sections a few times. It provides risk, simultaneously provides practice, and so long as the player succeeds before getting frustated provides a real sense of accomplishment.
That is, worse players get less play time and get bad ending, while good players play more and get good ending.
It's pretty clear that the author dislikes that proposal, as do I. I doesn't reward skill, it rewards grinding. It's the sloppy solution some games use to claim "replayability." It's one of the reasons I find much of the console RPG genre frustrating.
I can see the reviews now. "If you really good at this type of game, it's amazing. If you suck, but still enjoy it, you're in for a snorefest." After complaining about games that make you retry 20 times, you're offering less skilled players the exact same option. "Retry the harder, higher risk option until you succeed, or get a worse game. Want to see the best setpieces and setups, you're going to be retrying over, and over, and over.
Low skill players aren't just playing because they want to get to the end. They play for the same reason that more skilled players do: the game is inherently enjoyable. It seems like a bad idea to take the best of a game away from them because they lack the skills. Indeed, those very skills would best be honed by giving them challenging but still enjoyable games that they can finish.
In an ideal world what you suggest would be true, but we don't live in an ideal world.
At the moment CS degrees provide the required breadth and earn the respect of potential employers. IT and IS degrees aren't yet ready, if only because they don't get the respect. So for today, someone who wants to be a programmer is best served by a CS degree.
I'm not arguing that CS shouldn't have a math and proof background. I'm not suggesting that you don't need math, I'm suggesting that the requirements for math are often too high. I got my BS in CS from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I now work there on a research project. (Obviously I speak only for myself, not my employer.) I'm friends with a number of people who are seeking or have received MS or PhDs from the UW-Madison. Most of them agree: third semester calculus was a waste of their time. Many (myself included) just barely squeeked through, then prompted forgot the lot of it. I certainly never used it in getting my BS. My SO never used it while getting her MS. If you can get a Masters degree without needing to use one of the degree's prerequisites at all, it's probably a poor prerequisite.
CS is a broad field, coving cryptography, computer vision, computer graphics, networking, file systems, scheduling, distributed computing, databases, user interface design, programming language design, security, instrumentation, and more. Many of those fields of research simply don't need advanced math. You can engage in cutting edge research in, say, database work, or instrumentation, or distributed computing without ever dipping into calculus.
I've known multiple people who have the skills and knowledge to get a CS BS but they couldn't get the degree because the math requirement was too hard. If the math requirements never tie into the majority of courses, it's a bogus requirement. For those courses where you really need the advanced math, just make it a prereq for the course. Those people who want to focus on the mathematical side of CS will self-select; to an extent they already do.
I hear this repeatedly suggested. For most would-be programmers it's terrible advice. You might as well tell would be doctors, "If you just want to heal people, go to a community college. Universities are about education."
As you say, the result of a solid CS education is general theory and skills that you can adapt to a wide variety of situations. If you want jobs more interesting than writing yet another VB frontend to Access you'll need that grounding.
There are valid complaints about poorly focused CS programs with unreasonable math requirements. Yes, some CS work requires a solid grounding in advanced math. Most doesn't. You don't need 3 semesters of calculus to be able to reason about O() notation. Low level matrix math courses and perhaps statistics are more generally useful, but neither one has a calculus prereq. Unlike the grandparent, schools with these unreasonable requirements aren't afraid of vocational training, it's just historical. Many CS departments came out of mathematics departments and the link still lingers. CS majors do need some math to reason about CS, but not as much as many CS departments demand.
Brin's point is a bit muddled, but I think the idea is that modern scripting languages that seem like the logical replacement suffer from being too smart, too high level. Basic as shipped on many early home computers had the advantage of being relatively stupid. Sure, it was high level compared to assembly or even C, but it typically came with almost nothing in the way of supporting libraries. Modern scripting languages come with huge numbers of useful libraries. As a developer I love them; I spend less time reimplementing the wheel and more time solving new problems. But as a beginner these libraries can be a crutch.
I'm torn. On one hand, we're talking about kids. 25 years ago a simple text game was still cool, it was enough to inspire a child. Today, good luck. Newer, richer languages allow a child to create something interesting by modern standards.
On the other hand, your average kid is never exposed to the more primitive way of programming. It's the crude equivalent of making children learn to do division long hand before you let them use calculators. You've hidden some of the complexity, so the kids don't respect it as much. If a line of code and some clicking displays a graph, it's less impressive than having to type in all the code to display the graph. For those kids interested in computer programming, you might have set up false expectations. While by and large programmers work at a high level, you do need to understand what's going on under the hood. If you don't you won't be able to fix it when it breaks, or adjust your code to compensate. I'd hate to see a generation of potentional programmers all excited that they made a game using some game creation system, get to college and be hit with the low level stuff that seems completely unrelated to what they're doing, then drop out. Early exposure to the low level guts might chase off some kids who really don't have it in their hearts, while giving the interested ones a more realistic view of the complexity of programming.
If you're writing non-trivial, well organized procedural code, you've got some code organized along OO lines.
For many of these languages it's not like you're tied into the OO model. C++, Perl, and many other languages specifically bless saying, "screw it, plain old procedural programming will be the most expressive solution for this." But if you end up with an OO design, which you almost certainally occasionally do, the language gives you more support. Your refusal to seriously look at object oriented languages is just a refusal to consider that perhaps there is more than one tool in the programming toolbox.
As to how verbose OO languages are, that's an artifact of particular languages. You and I have written freaking COBOL! That's hardly a terse, efficient language. Some OO focused languages (C++) tend to be more verbose. Various languages have varying levels of verbosity.
As for Perl being taken over by academics, utter nonsense. Perl is about freedom of choice, about having access to a large number of tools so you have just the right tool for any given job. If you feel a procedural solution is the best one, Perl agrees. Did you want an object oriented solution? Perl's game to try. Functional? Perl's up for that. The Perl 6 work is trying to make Perl more unified and to strengthen the OO support. Indeed, OO support in Perl 5 is really a bolt-on job; Perl 6 promises to be easier to use, less clunky and verbose OO support. And if you don't like it, well, no one will force you to use it.
Thank god this guy is only a grad student and not actually designing games.
He's seriously advocating that it's reasonable that if you fail at a risk in the game, the game should become harder. A valid idea for some short-length games, like a PvP game of Quake or Starcraft, but insane for longer and especially single player games. That sort of stupid game design is why many people bounce on the quick save key every five minutes. To take the most common example, mainstream first person shooter design. "Oh, you easily blew through the level with lots of ammo and health left over? Okay, as a reward you start the next, harder level with all that ammo and health. Oh, you barely scraped through with almost not ammo or health? As punishment you advance to the next, harder level at death's door." Punish the less skilled players, reward the more skilled ones. In practice this means less skilled players rely on saves and restores, effectively changing it into the time tradeoff the author so dislikes. If you really want to go this route you need to take control of saving away from the player. When you do you change the price of failure for a weaker player from "wasted time reloading" to "restarting the game from scratch because I can't compensate for my earlier failure." There is a market for such games (see Diablo II in hardcore mode, or Nethack), but it's a small, small market. If you want to only discuss game design for hard core players, so be it, but say so up front; don't pretend you're making general statements.
The author then dismisses having to replay sections of the game as "not really risk." The air get thin in your ivory tower? Doesn't he get frustrated and angry when he fails at something in a game? There is emotional risk, perhaps the strongest connection any game developer gets to a player. The player is also risking time. Money is apparently a "real" risk in the author's mind, but he forgotten the old cliche: time is money. If someone has to replay an hour of game content, even for people making minimum wage that amounts to a $5.70 financial penalty. Add in the opportunity cost of something more fun the player could be doing instead and even just about any player is paying a large fine for failure.
In addition, replaying sections of the game isn't just punishment. In many (admitted, not all), replaying a section you failed is practice. The author bashs Ico. Yes, you only get one path at a time in Ico, you're forced to replay a section until you beat it. Those failed attempts are called "practice." Indeed, it's far better than directly charging me money for each attempt, or making the game harder as punishment. When I fail the practice improves my skills in general, improving my odds in later sections.
So what solution does the author offer? "Write huge amounts of content, let the skilled players blow through it quickly and not see most of it, and let the weaker players soak it all in and ." A nice idea in theory, but for most games not practical. This means you'll need to vastly increase your budget to support all this content. You'll then have the skilled players (which include many professional reviewers) either blow through it quickly and complain there wasn't much content for their money, or play it slowly and complain it's too easy. Either way you get bad reviews.
Ultimately he's suggesting, "Now that your time's a wager that whole system becomes a lot more fun." The exact same thing he dismissed as irrelevant on page 1 is suddenly great. He's still talking about punishing weaker players by costing them time (which is still money). Perhaps all the additional content will make that additional time actively entertaining. In that case, won't the skilled players be frustrated at missing all that entertaining content, or be frustrated that to see all the entertaining content they need to engage in dull gamep
Techies are just as mistrusting, and that mistrust is warranted. Maybe google.com doesn't go down, but my broadband does occasionally go down, which is effectivally identical to google.com being down for me. My job (a major university with multiple connections to different providers) has an outage perhaps once a year. Ignoring full outages, minor hiccups cause things like Google Spreadsheets to occasionally pop up the "Warning: You have been disconnected and your data has not been saved" message. Meanwhile, given the rapid rise and fall of services, do you really trust a given service to be there tomorrow? Google's not going anywhere, but is UberWebSpreadsheet3000 going to be there tomorrow? Anyone who thinks major service providers don't have outages should check Netcraft's coverage. If MySpace and Wikipedia, can be taken out by a power outage, so can lots of mid-size providers. If for-pay companies like Final Fantasy XI's game servers, online payment site StormPay, or domain registrar Joker's DNS servers can be taken down by DDOS, so can lots of other online businesses for which people pay for reliable access.
A bit of mistrust in online services, especially if you rely on that service, seems like the prudent thing to do.
We have secret elections for a number of important reasons. One of the most important is that your vote can't be used against you. There are a lot of people who would like to be able to see how you voted and would buy an illegal copy of the database you propose. A crooked politician might use voting records of people whose votes he should work to suppress. An amoral employer might fire employees who didn't vote as the employer wanted. The stereotypical example is that thanks to a secret ballot, if a deeply crooked politician hired thugs to intimidate voters, the voters could vote for his opponent, then lie about who they voted for to protect themselves from the thugs. I doubt this happens in the US, but it's probably a very real concern in Iraq.
Of the games you've listed, only one (Don't Rest Your Head) came out in 2006. It's hardly news for nerds.
If you're expecting Slashdot to become the shining beacon that highlights cutting edge indy RPG game design, well, you're a dreamer, I can respect that. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Compared to the front page of Slashdot, Games.Slashdot is small site. Compared to the normal video game focus of Games.Slashdot, tabletop RPGs are a microscopic market. To focus on the very small subset of indie games would lose even more readers.
I applaud your enthusiasm, but don't get your hopes quite so high. There is no renaissance. Worse, things are looking a little dark; the d20 boom has faded. The number of people making a living in the industry is going down. Profitable companies are going out of business or relying on donations to survive. Sales are down. Local hobby stores continue to close. If there is a historical analogy, you might compare it to the dark ages, except instead of turning to superstition and faith, they're turning to computer RPGs and Wizards of the Coast. Or maybe the fall of Rome; the once great society crumbling under it's own hubris, inability to adjust, and a bit of help from the barbarians of video games.
What you're describing is a nascent indie movement, largely pushed by The Forge. I'm glad it's out there. There is great stuff being done, including the games you mentioned. Experimental stuff has been happening since role-playing games were first created, but it does seem like the rate's increasing. If the RPG industry ends up a shadow of its former self, it's the indies who will provide much of the spark and drive that will keep it alive. This is what kept interactive fiction and hex-and-chit wargaming not only alive, but innovative. If the RPG industry doesn't fade away, the indies will provide the experimental, cutting edge stuff that the main industry will take years to adopt, a counterpart to the indie film scene, the sort of think Greg Costiyan is trying to push in video games with Manifesto Games.
A story on detecting photomanipulation apparently wasn't interesting in and of itself, so the author felt the need to drag in one of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: "Child pornographers also employ photo retouching to skirt felony laws."
No amount of photo retouching makes sexual abuse of a child legal. The only way I can see to "skirt" the law would be to transform the images so they plausible look artificial (Court rulings have upheld that as long as no children are involved, it's protected by the first amendment. Thus drawings, paintings, and 3-d models depicting child abuse are legal). Of course, if you're going to transform the image that much, you can legally get artificial images that look that way in the first place. Perhaps there are a few cases where this has been done, but I'm not buying that this is a real problem.
Given that the "article" is pretty much a summary designed to convince people to pay for their full research, it's embarassing. Learn to use your graphing software. And perhaps more importantly: don't connect discrete data points with lines. What am I supposed to make of the line between "Social Gamer" and "Dormant Gamer"? That there are hybrids who constitute about 18% of the market? That there are not hybrid Power/Dormant gamers?
Assuming this guy is sincere, he's tried the official channels for fixing this. The official channels didn't listen. He's seriously concerned for the safety of the Coast Guard. If he believes there is a real security problem and that official channels don't care, he'd be doing the wrong thing if he just kept silent.
Your group must have been gaming in a cave if White Wolf's Storyteller (1991) system with its lack of classes was so surprising. Skill based, classless systems had exists for over a decade at that point, including well known systems Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing System in Call of Cthulhu (1981), Hero Game's Hero System in Champions (1981), and Iron Crowne's Rolemaster (~1980). By the time Storyteller showed up, classless gameplay continued in games like Steve Jackson's GURPS (1986) and Mayfair's Mayfair Exponential Game System in DC Heroes (1985).
Furthermore, it's not a clear case of "classless with skills is better than classes." D&D remains the most popular RPG in the United States; these aren't millions of players who are simply ignorant of classless systems. Classless systems have existed for almost 25 years and are widely available. For many younger player, classless games have existed since they were born. Yet they play D&D.
Class based systems provide some advantages, in particular it provides guidance. Builting a character from absolutely nothing can be daunting; while many enjoy it, it can be hard to craft a character that fits well into the expectations of the game. In first edition D&D you would be hard pressed to design a character ill-suited for the D&D-style play, while in Vampire it's pretty easy to do so, possibly by accident.
Of course, guidance don't need to come from strict classes. In particular, many games now provide "archetypes", archtypical characters which players can use as a basis. For example, Shadowrun's Street Samurai, Mages, and Deckers; or Cyberpunk's Glitterboys and Reporters, or Big Eyes, Small Mouth's Gun Bunny's, Magical Girls, and Mecha. I find it telling that in many games with lots of character freedom, they still tend to neatly fit within the archetypes because they fit the game well.
It's also interesting that many games eliminated "classes" that represented training or profession, but kept some sort of rigid grouping that limits characters, especially new characters. This is true of most of White Wolf's products in which characters are sorted into Clans, Tribes, Kiths, and Traditions, all of which impact a player's choices at start up.
Also, you're completely missing why MMORPG's have classes: balance issues. MMORPGs are up against very different problems than tabletop games. In a tabletop game, if you make poor choices early in the game that limit your character later in the game, be it role-playing or mechanics, things can be tweaked. In a MMORPG, a poor selection of skills early in the game may lock you out of further advancement, meaning many more hours retraining or building up a new character. They is less of a problem for players interested in gaming that part of the system, or players willing to do lots of online research up front, but it's bad for casual players. Classes also make design easier. Given the complexity of MMORPG design, "easier" may mean "feasible." Many games designs want to create interesting mixes of player characters with different focuses. In a pure skill based system you are more likely to end up with a bland mix optimized in a small number of ways. This is tied into the poor skill choice issue: you might optimize in a way that seems cool ("I want to be the best fire mage possible") only to discover that no one wants you in their group because it turns out that the fire-mage/healer hybrid is far more efficient. While classes force you to sacrifice flexibility, it means you can better ensure that the remaining selections are more evenly attractive and playable.
Ultimately the line between class-based and class-less is a continuum, one of many. Few games exist perfectly at either end. There is no single answer for all games, tabletop or online. Game designers should reconsider the issue with each new game.
I can save and restart, allowing me to replay the same sections of the game over and over until I'm powerful enough to advance? That's not an innovation. At best it's a weird loophole allowing those willing to restart and restart and restart to get an edge. At worst it's an old friend in new clothes: grinding. I got tired of grinding with the original Dragon Warrior.
As for the ability to simply ignore the main plotline and go do the other stuff, it seems sucky that you have to pick one or the other. Maybe some things (like the Zombie Genocide) should require you to make an either or decision, but why force the player to make that decision for lesser side-expeditions like rescuing civilians? Many gamers will focus on the primary plotline, feel frustrated that they failed so many side quests, finish the game, then be done.
These aren't misunderstood features, this is simply bad game design.
That little bit irritated me as well, but I believe at border crossings you sacrifice most of your rights to privacy and freedom from search. If you don't want to be subject to arbitrary searches, the answer is "don't enter our country." The people policing the border have a fair amount of freedom to say, "No, I don't want you in our country." While it may be misapplied (as it was in this case), ultimately you're a visitor to their country and you have no fundamental right to be admitted.
However, this does reinforce my belief that airline security is wasting a hell of a lot of money on useless things. Trolling random people's computers for porn isn't a good use of their time.
While I believe laws regarding business financial records do require good records going back this far, in reality mistakes happen. And the further you get away from the mistake, the harder it is to explain. It becomes harder to defend against a charge the longer between the claimed crime and the charge; this is one of the reasons that many crimes have statutes of limitations. People and businesses shouldn't live in constant fear that five years ago they might have made a mistake for which they could be charged today.
Ultimately how far back we're willing to go in an investigation should be proportional with the accussed crime. Murder? Pretty far back. Shoplifting? Not very. Similarly for corporations? Massive fraud over many years? Go digging far back for evidence. Minor and common irregularities? We've got better things to do. Unfortunately sometimes investigators will decide they need to make a show of being Tough on (Corporate) Crime and will go on fishing expeditions to dig up anything they can, then make the biggest case they can over minor issues.
The people in question claim that these were minor irregularities, and fairly common ones. Assuming that's true, this smells of a fishing expedition and I disapprove. On the other hand, I don't know the situation well enough to know of the people making the claims are knowledgable and truthful.
I'd leave the whole anti-semitism thing out of the discussion. There are more people worrying about anti-semitism than actual anti-semites.
Who said they did? Violent crime has been on a steady trend down since a bit before the PlayStation 1 was released. Perhaps the reason for the falling crime rates is that parents on the whole have improved?
In case anyone in interested in spring of 1997 I visited TSR on a business trip. This was just after the Wizard's of the Coast buyout. For the curious here's my writeup on visiting TSR during the final days in which you can hear my perception of the mood (poor, but improving since the buyout) and learn useless things (Peter Adkison really likes ketchup. And why 50th level Dwarven Paladins, an illegal combination in 2nd ed, was a major test case.).
Glancing into the windows of a car parked on public property (the street in this case) has been fair game for cops for years. It's not a search. A crude rule of thumb is: if a stranger can do so without breaking the law, a cop is equally free to do so. Looking into your car is hardly illegal.