I agree that this seems more like harassment than rape, but I think that there still is an argument that a crime can occur to an adult online. If it's illegal to talk sexually with a minor online, how is it not illegal to sexually harass an adult? I also agree that, yes, someone can just go offline, but it's also illegal to intimidate or threaten a person so that they feel they have to leave a store or mall or location of any kind. Why is online any different?
Yes, the internet has a lot of dicks on it, but if you aren't allowed to do it in r/l, then why is someone allowed to do it online?
That's an interesting idea, I agree. However, since they've already revoked the key, that key itself isn't so much the point as it is about protecting their interests. They need to go after everyone posting up their IP (assuming that they can own a number) so as to put a strong face on copy infringement or whatever. Since it's revoked, putting it in a legal document probably isn't a big issue.
As someone who made maps of campus for Doom back in college, I can attest that students have been doing this for years without ill-effect. It's a natural reaction to want to create a game map of places you know, especially somewhere you spend hours on a daily basis. This is purely reactionary BS on their part due to the current environment surrounding violent video games in our country. I doubt they bothered to check if he was troubled or someone to be concerned about, and simply jumped to conclusions.
I agree (about not being pious about it). No matter how often I tell clients to backup files/software, or we sell them solutions to do it, it never fails that people lose important data. Including myself at home. You always assume things are running fine, or think 'hey, I'll just backup this weekend'. Then, system crash, power outage, etc, etc.
It happens, it will continue to happen, not much else to say really.
I'm glad someone mentioned it. I code plenty of ASP.Net applications for clients that run just fine on Firefox without having to make changes to Firefox (also my browser of choice). If you are using the 'Design'/WYSIWYG/Drag and Drop mode of Visual Studio, of course you are going to get a lot of MS-centric, poorly-thrown together code.
I only use the HTML view so that I know exactly what is going on in my page, and it doesn't take 4x longer to code like some people seem to imply coding by hand does. If you are a developer, you should be able to type without that being your 'bottleneck', and you should be testing how it works in multiple browsers regardless, so you're going to need to view it _somewhere_ else besides inside Visual Studio.
I guess the reverse of this is why do it early? You get no benefit out of having it done early unless for some reason you can't sleep at night knowing that it still needs to be done. Do we get some sort of bonus for having it done early? Perhaps I'm missing some 10% money back thing the government is doing, but I waited until this weekend, spent maybe an hour using TurboTax's website, and I was done. Local taxes I had to do by hand, and spent maybe 10 minutes. And yes, I did get money back, so it wasn't like I was worried about having to pay. Perhaps it's because I don't have anything crazy going on with investments or buying/revamping/selling real estate, but why all the rush to get it done so early?
I agree that there's a lot of information online, but there are days when I (and I'm sure a lot of us) get annoyed trying to find an example of what we want to do, or think we can do. I'm always a lot happier having an actual book sitting on my desk that I can poke through and reference when I want. Not to mention I always find something I didn't know about just by paging through things that look interesting.
And yes, books easily become out of date, but I just as often stumble on old web pages that no one has bothered to update in quite some time.
How is this off-topic? Probably the major reason why I haven't switched my home computer over to linux completely is that gaming (and various related graphics driver issues) is such a headache. There are certainly games available for Linux, but you can't expect that any game you want to play is going to be released for Linux. If I have to 'make' it work (emulators, etc), or hope it will be released one day (Steam) then it's not viable for a week, let alone 30 days.
I use my mouse all the time while coding, seeing as most applications these days are GUI driven. Either in my dev environment, or while testing the application itself. I can't recall the last time I coded for hours straight and then finally thought 'Hey I should compile and debug this application
'. The web applications even more so, since I don't see a need to try and navigate web pages with my keyboard alone (unless you are testing for accessibility needs).
I have to say first, that I've not had the problems that other people seem to have. I don't have FF2 crashing on me at all, and except for the continuing memory leaks, I like it a lot. Not once have I even come close to thinking that I need to revert to any version of 1.5.
As for bloat, I understand what everyone is saying, but I think they're doing a good job of balancing all the issues. They obviously want to make it useful to the common user, and that means including some of the features that make it competitive like spell checker and such. Mom or Dad or John Doe User don't want to have to customize it. They don't want to have to determine which version to download. The moment they have to start 'figuring it out' they're just going to give up and use IE because it's there.
We just had an article here that said users don't want to wait 4 seconds for a page to load, how long do you think they're going to spend on Firefox decisions? I can't even convince some of the other computer consultants I work with that Firefox is worth their time. Now I could see making a download available that's stripped down and barebones, but making it the non-default download. Something that all us geeks _would_ spend time looking for. But I think the guys who work on Firefox are doing a good job at keeping us happy, as well as trying to show all the rest of the user base that they have a great application.
I'd be ok with that. At least your reviews were honest. When I read reviews I'm looking for real information or feedback. Perhaps I'm not as cynical as I should be, but I'm not looking for marketing drivel. If I want that I'll go to the manufacturers site.
However I'd think the mark of a real (good?) review site/magazine/etc would be including the negative reviews to say 'Hey this is bad and we're calling them on it'. I've never been to hexus.net before, but I'll definitely begin to use them for reviews after this. Assuming that this wasn't all some advertisting ploy by them (ahhhh.. there's my cynicism).
Tough is one thing. Tough should be spending time and effort to achieve something in-game. Rare drops, difficult instances (dungeons), possibly even something that requires strategy.
Tough shouldn't be 'how much can we make them buy'. This is very similar to the discussions that have been taking place lately about purchasing content instead of having it available through playing the game.
I agree with your sentiment, but having played both D&D and WoW, I can say it's not the same experience.
D&D requires that you have friends, sit down with them in person (yes, now you can play online, etc), and play for some set amount of time. Usually there's a point where the DM says something like 'I'm going to bed' and everyone stops. It requires that everyone gets together, schedules a time to meet, and that the DM put work in before you start playing.
WoW on the other hand never needs to stop. It plays as long as you want to play, and if you are in a large enough guild, then there are always people around for you to work with. Even without a guild there are people out there looking for a pickup group. MMORPGs exacerbate the situation.
Part of the fun with D&D and any r/l gaming is that you are in a time crunch and know it. How far can we get? Think quick, come up with interesting solutions. Laugh and make. Even if you want to play all night, someone in your group is going to be tired and want to stop, so you all have to stop. MMORPGs take away all the restrictions and really enable you to become 'addicted' in all the ways that you might to something else.
Isn't this the same type of thing that people predicted for the Xbox? "Microsoft selling at a loss! Buy one and be the downfall of M$!!!!11!1!" And basically they sell at a loss, people buy a few games and everything turns out fine. Especially with things like Microsoft Points on Live.
I'm more than happy to purchase music online, and if a service was DRM free I'd sign up immediately. I do know one or two people who seem to relish the fact that they never buy music, which makes no sense to me. Yeah, maybe it's an achievement to spend the evening trying and succeeding in getting an unadulterated, non-radio editted song that you like. But I'm much happier to spend 30 seconds and $0.99 to buy a song I like and support the artist.
And when I have purchased enough songs, I burn them to CD and rip them to mp3. Apparently I'm converting to/from (?) lossy formats, but you know what. Who cares? It sounds fine when playing on my stereo, and fine on my PC. But it would be great to not have to go through that process to begin with. Or automate it with something like this.
"High Brow" activities aren't mutually exclusive with other activities. I enjoy going to the art museum, I enjoying reading, I enjoy theatre, and I enjoy video games. I'm sure there are plenty of others here who enjoy those activities as well. Enjoying something high brow doesn't require you to have a butler and live in an estate where you don't have to interact with the common man.
In fact I used to play the violin, currently practice martial arts, and this weekend I put up drywall. Go figure, I'm not just a computer geek ready to be pigeonholed for my entire life.
Sorry if this sounds a bit aggressive, but I dislike how people have the notion that someone can't cross boundaries. If you use computers you don't know how to use a hammer, you work on cars so you can't be intelligent, or you like video games so you can't be mature.
What about everyone finally being able to buy a 360 that wanted one? I waited and waited and finally got one a few months ago. Now I'm buying all the games as I figure out what I want and explore what is available.
I agree, there are somethings that may just not play well on a movie screen that need to be changed slightly. If it's got the Master Chief and the Covenant and Halo, then I think we're good to go. If some of the details need to be adjusted to make for a good story, then fine.
As long as it's not like a certain D&D movie where the only way you knew it was D&D (vs random fantasy) was because of the random spell reference every 15 minutes.
I agree that a lot of players are casual gamers, but that doesn't mean they don't want to be better. Give them the option: "I see you're having problems, would you like some assistance or would you like to play at an easier setting?". Casual players don't want to be bad players; some may not care because they _are_ casual players, but some of us are casual gamers because work/wife/things-that-are-not-games take precedence unfortunately.
It's too late for some of the 30+. I work with a number of people who see the computer as a tool that they use for their job, and when they go home they don't bother with it. They don't play games, they don't really bother with anything on the web, they may have personal mail, but I don't know.
Having just turned 30, I can say that I find myspace interesting to poke around on, yes I've created an account, I found it fairly boring, but then I don't have a whole class or school of friends who are also on to 'network' with. I think we're at a point where we have a fairly defined line of people who are growing up with computers as necessary to their existence, and on the older end, people who saw the computer developed during their lifetime and don't have it completely integrated into their life. Using the computer is a deliberate action for them, like getting in the car and driving somewhere.
For most teens and 20somethings it's something that's always on and part of the daily multi-tasking, so visiting myspace or facebook can happen a dozen times a day easily. I know that I'm on/. or Ars or msg boards constantly between eating, during commercials, while drinking my coffee. So to answer your question, if you really want to draw 30+ like that, you'd have to change people's lifestyles or come up with something that would draw those 30+ in who are like me and need a little bit more than teen angst blogs to read.
This is certainly a good idea since a large number of computer geeks (yes, admit it.. you are, and so am I) play, and we're the most likely to adopt e-books or books in PDF form. However I personally prefer to have a book in physical form for all things, so unless there's some motiviation to purchase the book in this format (financial or otherwise) I'm not going to be doing this.
The one benefit that is very clear though, is the ability to purchase books and have them immediately, and not be limited by what the bookstore happens to have in stock today.
You know, it's not that hard or costly to setup your own domain and Coppermine (or whatever image package you like). Not to mention you don't have to put up with ads or whatever other nonsense those public sites make you deal with.
I'm guessing there's going to be some sort of account system so that people aren't able to track anyone they like, but I'd like to hear about a lot more safety with something like this. It's for safety, and yet it seems to me like they just put together the paedophile killer app. Track those kids! They're not at home! Meet new strangers!
Or what about tracking spouses, or siblings, or parents. Is my phone going to have a special 'kid' chip that I can turn on and off so that I can't be tracked by this network, or is it tapping straight into which cell tower I'm associated to so it's phone independant? It's one thing if the company has access to this information, but making it available to everyone else is a liability waiting to happen. Maybe I'm just paranoid.
I've been doing web development for a few years now for a consulting company. Initially we just started with our own internal web applications for managing projects, time, expenses, all of that. Eventually we started developing web apps for other clients intranets until it got to the point where I couldn't manage it all myself. We hired two other developers and I took on more of a management role, along with continuing to develop and work on existing applications.
Not everyone wants to be involved with management, but if you enjoy web app work, perhaps you'd enjoy trying managing others and using your experience to help them.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that this seems more like harassment than rape, but I think that there still is an argument that a crime can occur to an adult online. If it's illegal to talk sexually with a minor online, how is it not illegal to sexually harass an adult? I also agree that, yes, someone can just go offline, but it's also illegal to intimidate or threaten a person so that they feel they have to leave a store or mall or location of any kind. Why is online any different?
Yes, the internet has a lot of dicks on it, but if you aren't allowed to do it in r/l, then why is someone allowed to do it online?
That's an interesting idea, I agree. However, since they've already revoked the key, that key itself isn't so much the point as it is about protecting their interests. They need to go after everyone posting up their IP (assuming that they can own a number) so as to put a strong face on copy infringement or whatever. Since it's revoked, putting it in a legal document probably isn't a big issue.
As someone who made maps of campus for Doom back in college, I can attest that students have been doing this for years without ill-effect. It's a natural reaction to want to create a game map of places you know, especially somewhere you spend hours on a daily basis. This is purely reactionary BS on their part due to the current environment surrounding violent video games in our country. I doubt they bothered to check if he was troubled or someone to be concerned about, and simply jumped to conclusions.
I agree (about not being pious about it). No matter how often I tell clients to backup files/software, or we sell them solutions to do it, it never fails that people lose important data. Including myself at home. You always assume things are running fine, or think 'hey, I'll just backup this weekend'. Then, system crash, power outage, etc, etc.
It happens, it will continue to happen, not much else to say really.
I'm glad someone mentioned it. I code plenty of ASP.Net applications for clients that run just fine on Firefox without having to make changes to Firefox (also my browser of choice). If you are using the 'Design'/WYSIWYG/Drag and Drop mode of Visual Studio, of course you are going to get a lot of MS-centric, poorly-thrown together code.
I only use the HTML view so that I know exactly what is going on in my page, and it doesn't take 4x longer to code like some people seem to imply coding by hand does. If you are a developer, you should be able to type without that being your 'bottleneck', and you should be testing how it works in multiple browsers regardless, so you're going to need to view it _somewhere_ else besides inside Visual Studio.
I guess the reverse of this is why do it early? You get no benefit out of having it done early unless for some reason you can't sleep at night knowing that it still needs to be done. Do we get some sort of bonus for having it done early? Perhaps I'm missing some 10% money back thing the government is doing, but I waited until this weekend, spent maybe an hour using TurboTax's website, and I was done. Local taxes I had to do by hand, and spent maybe 10 minutes. And yes, I did get money back, so it wasn't like I was worried about having to pay. Perhaps it's because I don't have anything crazy going on with investments or buying/revamping/selling real estate, but why all the rush to get it done so early?
I agree that there's a lot of information online, but there are days when I (and I'm sure a lot of us) get annoyed trying to find an example of what we want to do, or think we can do. I'm always a lot happier having an actual book sitting on my desk that I can poke through and reference when I want. Not to mention I always find something I didn't know about just by paging through things that look interesting.
And yes, books easily become out of date, but I just as often stumble on old web pages that no one has bothered to update in quite some time.
How is this off-topic? Probably the major reason why I haven't switched my home computer over to linux completely is that gaming (and various related graphics driver issues) is such a headache. There are certainly games available for Linux, but you can't expect that any game you want to play is going to be released for Linux. If I have to 'make' it work (emulators, etc), or hope it will be released one day (Steam) then it's not viable for a week, let alone 30 days.
I use my mouse all the time while coding, seeing as most applications these days are GUI driven. Either in my dev environment, or while testing the application itself. I can't recall the last time I coded for hours straight and then finally thought 'Hey I should compile and debug this application '. The web applications even more so, since I don't see a need to try and navigate web pages with my keyboard alone (unless you are testing for accessibility needs).
I have to say first, that I've not had the problems that other people seem to have. I don't have FF2 crashing on me at all, and except for the continuing memory leaks, I like it a lot. Not once have I even come close to thinking that I need to revert to any version of 1.5.
As for bloat, I understand what everyone is saying, but I think they're doing a good job of balancing all the issues. They obviously want to make it useful to the common user, and that means including some of the features that make it competitive like spell checker and such. Mom or Dad or John Doe User don't want to have to customize it. They don't want to have to determine which version to download. The moment they have to start 'figuring it out' they're just going to give up and use IE because it's there.
We just had an article here that said users don't want to wait 4 seconds for a page to load, how long do you think they're going to spend on Firefox decisions? I can't even convince some of the other computer consultants I work with that Firefox is worth their time. Now I could see making a download available that's stripped down and barebones, but making it the non-default download. Something that all us geeks _would_ spend time looking for. But I think the guys who work on Firefox are doing a good job at keeping us happy, as well as trying to show all the rest of the user base that they have a great application.
I'd be ok with that. At least your reviews were honest. When I read reviews I'm looking for real information or feedback. Perhaps I'm not as cynical as I should be, but I'm not looking for marketing drivel. If I want that I'll go to the manufacturers site.
However I'd think the mark of a real (good?) review site/magazine/etc would be including the negative reviews to say 'Hey this is bad and we're calling them on it'. I've never been to hexus.net before, but I'll definitely begin to use them for reviews after this. Assuming that this wasn't all some advertisting ploy by them (ahhhh.. there's my cynicism).
Tough is one thing. Tough should be spending time and effort to achieve something in-game. Rare drops, difficult instances (dungeons), possibly even something that requires strategy.
Tough shouldn't be 'how much can we make them buy'. This is very similar to the discussions that have been taking place lately about purchasing content instead of having it available through playing the game.
I agree with your sentiment, but having played both D&D and WoW, I can say it's not the same experience.
D&D requires that you have friends, sit down with them in person (yes, now you can play online, etc), and play for some set amount of time. Usually there's a point where the DM says something like 'I'm going to bed' and everyone stops. It requires that everyone gets together, schedules a time to meet, and that the DM put work in before you start playing.
WoW on the other hand never needs to stop. It plays as long as you want to play, and if you are in a large enough guild, then there are always people around for you to work with. Even without a guild there are people out there looking for a pickup group. MMORPGs exacerbate the situation.
Part of the fun with D&D and any r/l gaming is that you are in a time crunch and know it. How far can we get? Think quick, come up with interesting solutions. Laugh and make. Even if you want to play all night, someone in your group is going to be tired and want to stop, so you all have to stop. MMORPGs take away all the restrictions and really enable you to become 'addicted' in all the ways that you might to something else.
Isn't this the same type of thing that people predicted for the Xbox? "Microsoft selling at a loss! Buy one and be the downfall of M$!!!!11!1!" And basically they sell at a loss, people buy a few games and everything turns out fine. Especially with things like Microsoft Points on Live.
I agree with your disagreement.
I'm more than happy to purchase music online, and if a service was DRM free I'd sign up immediately. I do know one or two people who seem to relish the fact that they never buy music, which makes no sense to me. Yeah, maybe it's an achievement to spend the evening trying and succeeding in getting an unadulterated, non-radio editted song that you like. But I'm much happier to spend 30 seconds and $0.99 to buy a song I like and support the artist.
And when I have purchased enough songs, I burn them to CD and rip them to mp3. Apparently I'm converting to/from (?) lossy formats, but you know what. Who cares? It sounds fine when playing on my stereo, and fine on my PC. But it would be great to not have to go through that process to begin with. Or automate it with something like this.
"High Brow" activities aren't mutually exclusive with other activities. I enjoy going to the art museum, I enjoying reading, I enjoy theatre, and I enjoy video games. I'm sure there are plenty of others here who enjoy those activities as well. Enjoying something high brow doesn't require you to have a butler and live in an estate where you don't have to interact with the common man. In fact I used to play the violin, currently practice martial arts, and this weekend I put up drywall. Go figure, I'm not just a computer geek ready to be pigeonholed for my entire life. Sorry if this sounds a bit aggressive, but I dislike how people have the notion that someone can't cross boundaries. If you use computers you don't know how to use a hammer, you work on cars so you can't be intelligent, or you like video games so you can't be mature.
What about everyone finally being able to buy a 360 that wanted one? I waited and waited and finally got one a few months ago. Now I'm buying all the games as I figure out what I want and explore what is available.
I agree, there are somethings that may just not play well on a movie screen that need to be changed slightly. If it's got the Master Chief and the Covenant and Halo, then I think we're good to go. If some of the details need to be adjusted to make for a good story, then fine.
As long as it's not like a certain D&D movie where the only way you knew it was D&D (vs random fantasy) was because of the random spell reference every 15 minutes.
I agree that a lot of players are casual gamers, but that doesn't mean they don't want to be better. Give them the option: "I see you're having problems, would you like some assistance or would you like to play at an easier setting?". Casual players don't want to be bad players; some may not care because they _are_ casual players, but some of us are casual gamers because work/wife/things-that-are-not-games take precedence unfortunately.
It's too late for some of the 30+. I work with a number of people who see the computer as a tool that they use for their job, and when they go home they don't bother with it. They don't play games, they don't really bother with anything on the web, they may have personal mail, but I don't know.
/. or Ars or msg boards constantly between eating, during commercials, while drinking my coffee. So to answer your question, if you really want to draw 30+ like that, you'd have to change people's lifestyles or come up with something that would draw those 30+ in who are like me and need a little bit more than teen angst blogs to read.
Having just turned 30, I can say that I find myspace interesting to poke around on, yes I've created an account, I found it fairly boring, but then I don't have a whole class or school of friends who are also on to 'network' with. I think we're at a point where we have a fairly defined line of people who are growing up with computers as necessary to their existence, and on the older end, people who saw the computer developed during their lifetime and don't have it completely integrated into their life. Using the computer is a deliberate action for them, like getting in the car and driving somewhere.
For most teens and 20somethings it's something that's always on and part of the daily multi-tasking, so visiting myspace or facebook can happen a dozen times a day easily. I know that I'm on
This is certainly a good idea since a large number of computer geeks (yes, admit it.. you are, and so am I) play, and we're the most likely to adopt e-books or books in PDF form. However I personally prefer to have a book in physical form for all things, so unless there's some motiviation to purchase the book in this format (financial or otherwise) I'm not going to be doing this.
The one benefit that is very clear though, is the ability to purchase books and have them immediately, and not be limited by what the bookstore happens to have in stock today.
You know, it's not that hard or costly to setup your own domain and Coppermine (or whatever image package you like). Not to mention you don't have to put up with ads or whatever other nonsense those public sites make you deal with.
Overpriced Aesthetics
I'm a geek, but a lazy one. I'm happy to pay for some aesthetics.
I'm guessing there's going to be some sort of account system so that people aren't able to track anyone they like, but I'd like to hear about a lot more safety with something like this. It's for safety, and yet it seems to me like they just put together the paedophile killer app. Track those kids! They're not at home! Meet new strangers!
Or what about tracking spouses, or siblings, or parents. Is my phone going to have a special 'kid' chip that I can turn on and off so that I can't be tracked by this network, or is it tapping straight into which cell tower I'm associated to so it's phone independant? It's one thing if the company has access to this information, but making it available to everyone else is a liability waiting to happen. Maybe I'm just paranoid.
I've been doing web development for a few years now for a consulting company. Initially we just started with our own internal web applications for managing projects, time, expenses, all of that. Eventually we started developing web apps for other clients intranets until it got to the point where I couldn't manage it all myself. We hired two other developers and I took on more of a management role, along with continuing to develop and work on existing applications.
Not everyone wants to be involved with management, but if you enjoy web app work, perhaps you'd enjoy trying managing others and using your experience to help them.