I refer you to the book "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood.
In it, a right wing group seizes control of the government, then completely removes women from the economy by the simple method of deactivating all the Financial cards (everyone carried electronic devices rather than cash) where "sex = F".
It should be a trivial mental exercise for the reader to imagine parallel issues.
Well, since Cities are subunits of the State, with no independent Sovereignity (They are created and recognized by the State, and can be abolished by the State with no reprecussions, a State can not be abolished by the Federal Government), a State has the right to say "OKay, Toledo, you have to spend $1M this way".
State's right's activists protest the fact that the Federal Government, which was created by the States not the other way 'round, has taken up the habit of saying "Okay Ohio, you have to spend $100M this way".
How's about parents understand that during events which are important and emotional enough to be broadcast "live", you realize that people may, maybe, just maybe, get excited and emotional enough as a result of something that their internal censors may temporarily shut off and unpleasant words may occur.
It's called life. The only reason "Fuck" is cool to say is because it gets such a huge reaction. If it was treated like any other word, say hemmoroid perhaps, then it wouldn't be used nearly as often.
Watch TV with your kid, or ensure it's turned off. It's called parenting, and it's been fairly effective for about 3,000,000 years. It's only been ineffective for the last 20 or so.
Your botting harmed me (well, maybe not me specifically, unless you were on my server at the given time). It certainly harmed Blizzard.
Blizzard set up WoW servers to handle a certain number of people online at a given moment, lets say a server can handle 2000 players online at once.
Blizzard accounts for servers based on an estimate of how long a given account would be on at a time. Let's say four hours in a sitting is their estimate.
So, they believe they can have one server for every (2000*6) = 12,000 accounts.
You, by sitting online for 24 hours a day, take up the resources of 6 accounts. This leads directly to more lag, queues, and an unbalanced economy.
Your unattended bot that is clearing a given area takes mobs away from other players who may need them for quests, XP, or drops.
Vivendi/Blizzard is claiming that the WowGlider program accesses their servers in an unauthorized fashion, and imitates their intellectual property to do so. They aren't claiming the right to tell you what you can and can't run on your PC willy-nilly. They are claiming the right to tell you what software environment they want connecting to their servers. Much like your boss requires you to have or not have certain programs running when you access their VPN (at least mine does, and if your IT department is at all security conscious it does as well)
WoW allows mods, hell, it encourages them. However, any mod that makes it so you can "play the game" without being at your PC is explicitly forbidden. They've banned users of fishing bots before. You're supposed to be playing the game by sitting at your computer, and actively killing things. Yes, it's a time sink. All recreation is. If you're not having fun with it, go and do something else.
Glider bots/farmer bots do harm those who aren't using them. They consume server resources, making the game less responsive for everyone. They tag rare mobs, denying that kill and the resulting loot to "honest" players. They mine rare resources, again denying them to "honest" players. And the effects they have on the marketplace are demonstrable. For example, about a year ago, a botter discovered a speed/teleportation hack that made it possible to farm 16-slot bags (the largest bag in the game at the time). Instantly, the auction house price on those dropped from 30-40 gold to 5 gold. And there was no longer any market for any smaller size bag, which made it difficult for aspiring tailors to sell product (their bags). Similar hacks were found for other items.
Ban em all, find the people running them, and execute kill -9's on them. I don't mean their process, I mean them.
Actually, it was over long before that. HAL was just following it's programming, perfectly.
HAL was programmed to eliminate any possibile failure points in the mission that he could. Through the spaceflight, HAL observed that the humans in the mission were failable (one of them made a suboptimal chess move, a handful of other mistakes were made). HAL had the ability to complete the mission on it's own. Therefore, HAL made the decision, in line with it's programming, to eliminate the human element.
It makes sense, really, when you think about it. And truly, if Dave had just gone along with it and died, HAL would have finished the job perfectly fine.
First off...it's beyond a *reasonable doubt*, not a shadow of a doubt.
More importantly, that only applies to criminal prosecutions, not civil ones. In Civil lawsuits, you only have to prove you're 51% likely to be right. Admittedly, the amount of your judgement is lower if you're only barely correct (usually...), but still, it's not all that hard of a standard.
In addition, good lawyers cost $150 or more per hour. Defending yourself against an RIAA action will take any lawyer at least 10 hours of time, almost certainly more if it goes to trial. And no, you don't get reimbursed if you get found to be the winner (except in certain very difficult to prove situations, which almost certainly would rarely apply here).
"So not wanting to have to explain to his 5 year old why that one woman was putting her fist in the ass of another woman is somehow wanting to bring them up in a padded world. Jesus, I'm all for personal responsibility"
Install net nanny software on your own PC. Put your child's computer somewhere where you can see what he's/she's doing. Implement a whitelist rule on your home network. Or actually (gasp) don't allow your child to use the Internet (ZOMG!! CHild Abuse!!!!).
It's called parenting. You protect your child from danger. Just like you don't let him play in the middle of the industrial zone or on the center lane of the Highway, you shouldn't let him galavant out on the Internet until he's old enough to protect himself, take care of himself, and respect the limits you place upon him.
Your inability to parent should not cost me my right to see two consenting adults engage in whatever activity they deem fit to show me.
COBOL lives, some 20 years after it's death had been predicted, and thrives. Why?
Because, it makes sense.
You don't have to develop corporate variable naming standards, coding standards, and all that, because the language makes it happen automatically.
You can take a fresh wet behind the ears kid, give him the code, and he can figure out what's going on without any significant trouble, because it happens in order, there is none of this fancy renaming variables on the fly and obfuscating code with magic numbers stuff that is all the rage in C++, Java, and other "modern" languages.
You want to add 2 and 2? Great, you get 4, which is what the accountants want. You can't program 2+2 to equal 27 like you can in C++. One operation does one thing, does it well and accurately, and moves on.
Business only has one real question: "How much money did I make last year?" COBOL provides all the tools to answer it.
Do they not log because the system just gets in their way, adds no value (suggested fixes, workflow tracking) to the process, and takes too long? Then fix/replace the software.
Do they not log because 50% of their calls are quick hit 20 second resolutions and logging takes too long? Make it so they can log a call with nothing more than "password reset - extension 2710 - Complete" and move on.
Do they not log because they are so busy taking calls they don't have *time* to log? Then you need to implement a faster system, or staff up so that they aren't overworked.
Do they not log because they're lazy? Then you need to come down with the big hammer. But don't assume it's this, it's probably one of the others.
Nahh, you don't have to explain why their password was reset. Users will justify it to themselves without thinking.
As part of my job, I cover helpdesk calls for a ~500 person company. About 25% of the calls I get are "I can't login to system X". 90% of the resolutions of that problem are to reset the password to something and carry on. So, if I were to reset someone's mail password, they would discover a problem, call into the helpdesk, their account would be unlocked, their password reset, and everyone would assume the user just either forgot their password, had their shift key stuck, or some other nonsense.
But if I was a Gold Seller on an MMORPG, I'd very much be in favor of the IRS declaring that the gold was my property and I was to be taxed on it.
Why?
Because then the government has declared it's *mine*, therefore despite any statements in the EULA or elsewhere, the Developers of the Game could not arbitrarily close my account for gold selling. They could not fix bugs in the game that I was exploiting to get more gold faster. They couldn't do anything to prevent my business from operating, or else I'd have a nice little conversion of property suit, or restraint of trade, or even an Anti-Trust suit.
The taxation rate would be consistent, so I could factor it into my pricing and business plan and still remain quite profitable. And it would be completely legal and they could do nothing to stop me.
So, if I were Blizzard, Turbine, or any other game maker attempting to control the Gold Reselling market, I would fight this tooth and nail and claw and frostshock.
Probably, yeah. Poker tournaments are tracked things, you sign up on a computer using your Poker Club card (at least at the Casino I was at), the payouts are calculated on the computer, the winners are given forms printed on the computer that are given to the cage to exchange for cash (or chips, I suppose). Since they don't have anywhere near that level of tracking available for casino table games, they have no way of proving that you didn't buy $4,000 in chips to cash out that $3,500.
You are allowed to deduct any losses from your winnings for tax purposes. You cannot claim an overall loss (ie if I won $500 and lost $600, I can't claim a $100 loss for taxes). Any chip purchases, tournament buyins, or other money you gave to the casino can be offset against your winnings thereby reducing the final tax bill.
And yes, I would know, since I had to fill out paperwork for winning a poker tournament in Atlantic City. The $1360 I won is offset by my $65 buy-in, as well as the $300 in other buy-ins I had over the weekend, as well as the other miscellaneous losses I can document.
(Documentation is key, if you are going to gamble with any possibility of winning more than the $599.99 that doesn't trigger the paperwork, write down precisely when and how much you bought in for, and how much and when you cashed out for)
No, more like because in the recent past (1960's and before, to be specific) there were a significant number of cases, predominantly in the South, where requirements that were on their face reasonable were interpreted in such a way as to systemically deny the right to vote to a significant number of members of a minority group (blacks, to be specific).
In one famous case, a Negro gentleman who was a PhD in Political Science and had written a number of texts on the subject was forced to take a test on the US Constitution as part of a voter registration requirement. The scorer of the test (a White High School dropout) failed him and he was refused a voting card.
Because we have a history of that sort of thing, people are rightly very paranoid about any requirement that could be construed as able to deny someone the right to vote. An ID could very easily be challenged on racial grounds("Hmm, Hey Vern, does that look fake to you?" "Why yes Cletus, it does." "NO ballot for you, nigger").
The United States of America was formed by a coalition of 13 territories with (reasonably well) defined borders and citizens that chose to bind themselves together into a Nation. The States chose not to cede all of their soverign authority to the National government in the agreement that bound them (well...more or less...see Civil War).
Most other "Federalist" nations created the States as subunits of the Nation, not the other way round.
The myth in question was "Confederate Rocket", wherein it was stated that the Confederacy near the end of the Civil War launced a rocket from richmond to DC, a distance of ~100 miles.
The mythbusters showed that it was feasible to build something that would launch using Nitrus Oxide and carbon/wax, but it didn't go anywhere near 100 miles. More like 2000 feet, as I recall.
So the conclusion was "A rocket was plausible, but the results postulated were unlikely"
(as an aside, later they repeated the experiment using salami as the fuel...it also worked, although only in a very small scale)
-1 Incorrect.
There are two sorts of Credit Checks, "Hard" credit checks, such as those made when you're applying for a loan, do in fact have a small (under 10 points) effect on your FICO score.
"Soft" credit checks, such as those done in conjunction with employment screening, renting an apartment, basically anything other than opening a line of credit, are not a factor in your score. They may appear on your report, under the informational section, but the formula does not consider them.
Even with the "Hard" checks, if you have a number of them within a certain period of time, it only counts as one incident for scoring purposes, so for example if you have 5 places pull your credit in an attempt to get an auto loan, it only counts as one "Credit related enquiry" on your report.
And with the formula, even hard checks are not a factor after a very short period of time, somewhere between 4 and 6 months.
"And if the teacher is distributing content in violation of the law, then that teacher should be fired."
But that teacher isn't. Educational use is enshrined in the Copyright law as an allowable use. DRM that refuses to allow this is illegal, as it infringes on a legal right.
Similarly, commentary, parody, and many other "Fair Use" exceptions exist, none of which the current DRM regime respects.
Why in the heck is *anyone* trying to take credit for *any* piece of the unmitigated and unplayable disaster that is DDO?
Seriously, if I was the world designer, I'd be distancing myself from that smoking bombshell as far and as fast as possible. Turbine somehow managed to take what should have been the #1 slam dunk MMORPG franchise, the potential World of Warcraft killer, and turn it into a laughingstock that will quietly fall back into the shadows and be even smaller and less relevant than Puzzle Pirates.
Slashdot Mirror
In it, a right wing group seizes control of the government, then completely removes women from the economy by the simple method of deactivating all the Financial cards (everyone carried electronic devices rather than cash) where "sex = F".
It should be a trivial mental exercise for the reader to imagine parallel issues.
State's right's activists protest the fact that the Federal Government, which was created by the States not the other way 'round, has taken up the habit of saying "Okay Ohio, you have to spend $100M this way".
It's called life. The only reason "Fuck" is cool to say is because it gets such a huge reaction. If it was treated like any other word, say hemmoroid perhaps, then it wouldn't be used nearly as often.
Watch TV with your kid, or ensure it's turned off. It's called parenting, and it's been fairly effective for about 3,000,000 years. It's only been ineffective for the last 20 or so.
Your botting harmed me (well, maybe not me specifically, unless you were on my server at the given time). It certainly harmed Blizzard.
Blizzard set up WoW servers to handle a certain number of people online at a given moment, lets say a server can handle 2000 players online at once.
Blizzard accounts for servers based on an estimate of how long a given account would be on at a time. Let's say four hours in a sitting is their estimate.
So, they believe they can have one server for every (2000*6) = 12,000 accounts.
You, by sitting online for 24 hours a day, take up the resources of 6 accounts. This leads directly to more lag, queues, and an unbalanced economy.
Your unattended bot that is clearing a given area takes mobs away from other players who may need them for quests, XP, or drops.
Your actions harmed others. Deal with it.
WoW allows mods, hell, it encourages them. However, any mod that makes it so you can "play the game" without being at your PC is explicitly forbidden. They've banned users of fishing bots before. You're supposed to be playing the game by sitting at your computer, and actively killing things. Yes, it's a time sink. All recreation is. If you're not having fun with it, go and do something else.
Glider bots/farmer bots do harm those who aren't using them. They consume server resources, making the game less responsive for everyone. They tag rare mobs, denying that kill and the resulting loot to "honest" players. They mine rare resources, again denying them to "honest" players. And the effects they have on the marketplace are demonstrable. For example, about a year ago, a botter discovered a speed/teleportation hack that made it possible to farm 16-slot bags (the largest bag in the game at the time). Instantly, the auction house price on those dropped from 30-40 gold to 5 gold. And there was no longer any market for any smaller size bag, which made it difficult for aspiring tailors to sell product (their bags). Similar hacks were found for other items.
Ban em all, find the people running them, and execute kill -9's on them. I don't mean their process, I mean them.
Evolution happens over thousands of years, you live maybe 100.
Furthermore, how many species have gone extinct over the past 300 years? At least 1000.
It's not "their network", it's my network. I paid the taxes that pay their expenses, I have rights to use it to research or communicate as I wish.
I mean really...Bush only invaded Iraq because that waitress brought him FRENCH dressing instead of RANCH like he asked...
HAL was programmed to eliminate any possibile failure points in the mission that he could. Through the spaceflight, HAL observed that the humans in the mission were failable (one of them made a suboptimal chess move, a handful of other mistakes were made). HAL had the ability to complete the mission on it's own. Therefore, HAL made the decision, in line with it's programming, to eliminate the human element.
It makes sense, really, when you think about it. And truly, if Dave had just gone along with it and died, HAL would have finished the job perfectly fine.
More importantly, that only applies to criminal prosecutions, not civil ones. In Civil lawsuits, you only have to prove you're 51% likely to be right. Admittedly, the amount of your judgement is lower if you're only barely correct (usually...), but still, it's not all that hard of a standard.
In addition, good lawyers cost $150 or more per hour. Defending yourself against an RIAA action will take any lawyer at least 10 hours of time, almost certainly more if it goes to trial. And no, you don't get reimbursed if you get found to be the winner (except in certain very difficult to prove situations, which almost certainly would rarely apply here).
Install net nanny software on your own PC. Put your child's computer somewhere where you can see what he's/she's doing. Implement a whitelist rule on your home network. Or actually (gasp) don't allow your child to use the Internet (ZOMG!! CHild Abuse!!!!).
It's called parenting. You protect your child from danger. Just like you don't let him play in the middle of the industrial zone or on the center lane of the Highway, you shouldn't let him galavant out on the Internet until he's old enough to protect himself, take care of himself, and respect the limits you place upon him.
Your inability to parent should not cost me my right to see two consenting adults engage in whatever activity they deem fit to show me.
Because, it makes sense.
You don't have to develop corporate variable naming standards, coding standards, and all that, because the language makes it happen automatically.
You can take a fresh wet behind the ears kid, give him the code, and he can figure out what's going on without any significant trouble, because it happens in order, there is none of this fancy renaming variables on the fly and obfuscating code with magic numbers stuff that is all the rage in C++, Java, and other "modern" languages.
You want to add 2 and 2? Great, you get 4, which is what the accountants want. You can't program 2+2 to equal 27 like you can in C++. One operation does one thing, does it well and accurately, and moves on.
Business only has one real question: "How much money did I make last year?" COBOL provides all the tools to answer it.
That is why COBOL lives, and always will.
Do they not log because the system just gets in their way, adds no value (suggested fixes, workflow tracking) to the process, and takes too long? Then fix/replace the software.
Do they not log because 50% of their calls are quick hit 20 second resolutions and logging takes too long? Make it so they can log a call with nothing more than "password reset - extension 2710 - Complete" and move on.
Do they not log because they are so busy taking calls they don't have *time* to log? Then you need to implement a faster system, or staff up so that they aren't overworked.
Do they not log because they're lazy? Then you need to come down with the big hammer. But don't assume it's this, it's probably one of the others.
As part of my job, I cover helpdesk calls for a ~500 person company. About 25% of the calls I get are "I can't login to system X". 90% of the resolutions of that problem are to reset the password to something and carry on. So, if I were to reset someone's mail password, they would discover a problem, call into the helpdesk, their account would be unlocked, their password reset, and everyone would assume the user just either forgot their password, had their shift key stuck, or some other nonsense.
People aren't smart
Why?
Because then the government has declared it's *mine*, therefore despite any statements in the EULA or elsewhere, the Developers of the Game could not arbitrarily close my account for gold selling. They could not fix bugs in the game that I was exploiting to get more gold faster. They couldn't do anything to prevent my business from operating, or else I'd have a nice little conversion of property suit, or restraint of trade, or even an Anti-Trust suit.
The taxation rate would be consistent, so I could factor it into my pricing and business plan and still remain quite profitable. And it would be completely legal and they could do nothing to stop me.
So, if I were Blizzard, Turbine, or any other game maker attempting to control the Gold Reselling market, I would fight this tooth and nail and claw and frostshock.
"LFG: Juliet's Balcony, have Tank and Healer, need DPS, full on Bards"
Probably, yeah. Poker tournaments are tracked things, you sign up on a computer using your Poker Club card (at least at the Casino I was at), the payouts are calculated on the computer, the winners are given forms printed on the computer that are given to the cage to exchange for cash (or chips, I suppose). Since they don't have anywhere near that level of tracking available for casino table games, they have no way of proving that you didn't buy $4,000 in chips to cash out that $3,500.
You are allowed to deduct any losses from your winnings for tax purposes. You cannot claim an overall loss (ie if I won $500 and lost $600, I can't claim a $100 loss for taxes). Any chip purchases, tournament buyins, or other money you gave to the casino can be offset against your winnings thereby reducing the final tax bill.
And yes, I would know, since I had to fill out paperwork for winning a poker tournament in Atlantic City. The $1360 I won is offset by my $65 buy-in, as well as the $300 in other buy-ins I had over the weekend, as well as the other miscellaneous losses I can document.
(Documentation is key, if you are going to gamble with any possibility of winning more than the $599.99 that doesn't trigger the paperwork, write down precisely when and how much you bought in for, and how much and when you cashed out for)
In one famous case, a Negro gentleman who was a PhD in Political Science and had written a number of texts on the subject was forced to take a test on the US Constitution as part of a voter registration requirement. The scorer of the test (a White High School dropout) failed him and he was refused a voting card.
Because we have a history of that sort of thing, people are rightly very paranoid about any requirement that could be construed as able to deny someone the right to vote. An ID could very easily be challenged on racial grounds("Hmm, Hey Vern, does that look fake to you?" "Why yes Cletus, it does." "NO ballot for you, nigger").
Lame? Yes. Would it happen? Yes.
The United States of America was formed by a coalition of 13 territories with (reasonably well) defined borders and citizens that chose to bind themselves together into a Nation. The States chose not to cede all of their soverign authority to the National government in the agreement that bound them (well...more or less...see Civil War).
Most other "Federalist" nations created the States as subunits of the Nation, not the other way round.
The mythbusters showed that it was feasible to build something that would launch using Nitrus Oxide and carbon/wax, but it didn't go anywhere near 100 miles. More like 2000 feet, as I recall.
So the conclusion was "A rocket was plausible, but the results postulated were unlikely"
(as an aside, later they repeated the experiment using salami as the fuel...it also worked, although only in a very small scale)
Will they ever learn?
-1 Incorrect. There are two sorts of Credit Checks, "Hard" credit checks, such as those made when you're applying for a loan, do in fact have a small (under 10 points) effect on your FICO score. "Soft" credit checks, such as those done in conjunction with employment screening, renting an apartment, basically anything other than opening a line of credit, are not a factor in your score. They may appear on your report, under the informational section, but the formula does not consider them. Even with the "Hard" checks, if you have a number of them within a certain period of time, it only counts as one incident for scoring purposes, so for example if you have 5 places pull your credit in an attempt to get an auto loan, it only counts as one "Credit related enquiry" on your report. And with the formula, even hard checks are not a factor after a very short period of time, somewhere between 4 and 6 months.
But that teacher isn't. Educational use is enshrined in the Copyright law as an allowable use. DRM that refuses to allow this is illegal, as it infringes on a legal right.
Similarly, commentary, parody, and many other "Fair Use" exceptions exist, none of which the current DRM regime respects.
Seriously, if I was the world designer, I'd be distancing myself from that smoking bombshell as far and as fast as possible. Turbine somehow managed to take what should have been the #1 slam dunk MMORPG franchise, the potential World of Warcraft killer, and turn it into a laughingstock that will quietly fall back into the shadows and be even smaller and less relevant than Puzzle Pirates.