Problem is, WoW puts a lot more importance on that little number next to your name--your level--than it does on a player's ingenuity. I run a mage, so I can't speak for other classes, but my chance to hit an opponent even four levels higher than me is about 25%. No amount of brainpower or trickery can compensate for that.
I totally agree. That's why I find it so pointless when people talk about "bringing Linux to the masses." It's never going to happen, and I don't think it should.
I'm not talking about KDE vs. Gnome. The trouble is, at least the last time I had a desktop Linux install running, neither of those environments was terribly internally consistent. Or stable, for that matter. (Granted, it has been a while.) I've also found the memory and CPU requirements for desktop Linux to be equivalent to (or higher than) what Windows wants. And since I'm much more of a pragmatist than Richard Stallman, I guess that just leads me to ask, what's the point?
BTW, thank you for being the only responder thus far to not call me some manner of fucking moron. It definitely bolsters your case.:)
It's not a question of cognitive ability, and I'm quite capable of using Linux, thank you. It's actually my preferred OS for servers. But if you think it belongs on everyone's desktop (keeping in mind that people, as a whole, really suck with technology), you're clearly out of touch with reality.
Nobody with half or more of a brain could possibly argue that windows has the best possible desktop out there
I never said that. I'm not sure that such a an abstract concept as "the best possible desktop" even exists. Do you drive the best possible car? Do you live in the best possible house? It's far, far too complex of an issue to be shoehorned into a linear scale like that.
The KDE and Gnome projects keep adding enhancements, bells, and whistles to make their desktop "better" than windows and then wonder why people still use wondows desktops.
It's because, as so many people fail to understand, it's not about bells and whistles. I don't need windowshade mode or alpha transparency. I'd much rather have a stable, consistent interface. But such things as consistency and stability are far from glamourous, and require strict project management and a good helping of elbow grease. It's not something I'd want to do in my spare time, and I don't fault others for feeling the same way. But without it, you just can't compete with the commercial offerings.
If you're going to use something as broken as a "desktop", why should you bother switching away from the one you already know.
Precisely. Especially when the new one, while stronger in some areas, has just as many flaws in others.
Speaking of having no fucking clue, you should look in the mirror.
Have you ever used windows in a business environment? What kind of crack do you have to smoke to see windows applications, hell, even windows components as having a consistent interface.
Agreed. I don't think you can ever have an openly programmable environment in which all third-party developers follow all the rules. But Windows itself is generally consistent. There's usually a preferred "Windows way" of setting something up. In Linux, there are many different ways, each as legitimate as the next. Which is great for the person writing the code, but not so wonderful for everyone else involved.
Do that, and you'll have something that is truly better; something that it would be worth considering a switch to. Until you've done something like that, people will stay with windows.
Which is pretty much what I'm saying. Linux, as a desktop OS, offers no incentive for people to switch at the moment. And with the advent of Win2000/XP, Windows is stable enough to be tolerable. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but OS X notwithstanding, I think they offer the best current solution for a vast majority of people.
Why are people so obsessed with pushing Linux onto mainstream desktops, anyway? It seems to me that doing so would require eliminating a lot of what the geek community values in it in the first place.
It is precisely because of people like you that have no fucking clue what 99% of the world (some of us geeks included) wants in a desktop that Linux zealots have been fending off this argument for upwards of five years now.
Linux is absolutely not ready for the desktop. Until the community settles on a consistent interface and set of UI standards, it will never be ready for the desktop. For all the talk about how Microsoft is more committed to shiny new features than stability and consistency, they do a much, much better job than the OSS community in terms of UI. The controls in every window manager I've ever used have felt clunky and awkward. Shortcut keys are different in every application. And you've got 600,000 people each more interested in making their own window managers than in helping to develop a unified standard.
Which is fine. They're hobbyists, after all. But with that kind of attitude, Linux will always remain a hobbyist OS, and will never make it onto the desktop en masse.
The latter is very legal in VB. In every language I've ever seen, the expression in an if statement has to reduce to a boolean.
In all honesty, VB isn't as bad as people make it out to be. It certainly has a number of glaring weaknesses (particularly VB6, which is still in widespread use), but it's pretty useable as long as you pay attention to the inner workings of the language. Of course, it takes as much time to gain such an intimate knowledge of VB as it would to do so with a "real" language such as C++, so you really have to wonder what the point is.
I don't think any good programmer uses VB6 by choice (almost all good programmers I know are pretty language-agnostic to begin with), but when you have to use it, it's really not as miserable of an experience as people seem to think.
Oops, forgot to escape a less-than sign in the second paragraph. It should read:
I'd also like to know where that improved rate of return is going to come from, particularly since the overhead involved in privatization is much higher than the <1% overhead that the current system uses.
My problem with Bush's privatization plan is that he's flat-out lying. There really isn't a crisis; if nothing's changed, the system will remain solvent at least until 2042.
I'd also like to know where that improved rate of return is going to come from, particularly since the overhead involved in privatization is much higher than the
If Bush were taking part in a reasonable debate on the subject, I'd definitely listen to what he had to say. The way things are now, I get the feeling that there's nothing in this privatization plan other than a huge gift for his investment house buddies. If the facts are on your side, then what's with all the deception?
Well, sort of. That wasn't why I voted for Kerry, but by and large, I believe it to be true.
I voted for Kerry because of his economic, social and diplomatic agenda. It's pretty clear to me that if you're not in the top 10% income bracket, it's against your economic interest to vote Republican. My stance on a number of issues (such as abortion rights, the role of corporations in America, and the vital need for transparency in the democratic process) is also a lot closer to Kerry's.
Furthermore, I chose the major candidate who didn't have a history of syphoning money to the rich, lying to the American public to start a frivilous war (that just happened to funnel billions of dollars into the pockets of some of his biggest supporters), alienating almost all of our closest allies and blurring the line between church and state. I don't believe that John Kerry would have planted shills in the White House press room to lob softball questions at him. I don't think his subordinates would release government propaganda disguised as news reporting to hundreds of local news stations around the country. I don't think the Democratic Party would send checks to "journalists" in exchange for favorable write-ups. And I don't think John Kerry (or Al Gore, for that matter) would have run up a national deficit even half the size of the one we're looking at now.
The facts speak for themselves. I don't see how one could analyze these facts and not come to the conclusion that the presidency of George W. Bush has been a disaster for this country. The fact that this administration is far and away the most secretive in history doesn't bode well for them, either. But sadly, given that polls show that about half the country still thinks we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I don't think that the facts really have much to do with it anymore.
Good, Bush has leadership skills. Wonderful. That doesn't change the fact that his agenda is radically different than Kerry's. Do you think we'd be talking about Social Security privatization if Kerry were in office?
Whether you like it or not, you're choosing a lot more than a candidate's personality when you vote for president. The results of the presidential election essentially set the entire country's agenda for the next four years, particularly with a single party controlling both houses of Congress.
I do, however, agree with you that if you have no idea what you're doing (and most people in America clearly do not), stay the hell away from the voting booth.
You're completely missing the point. Of everything. You're missing the point of why OSS graphics apps are virtually unuseable (sadly, they are), what he's proposing (only appropriate given that you haven't even read the article:), and the reason that most developers I know even write software in the first place (to solve a problem, not to express themselves in a creative way--although that is certainly part of what makes programming enjoyable).
Sure, all applications are different, but they all stick to some basic conventions. For instance, you'd be hard-pressed to find a (GUI-based) text editor that placed its Undo command anywhere but at the top of the Edit Menu in the menu bar. This is a good thing. It means that I have to learn less about the idiosyncracies of the software I'm using, and everything behaves the same. Ctrl+X should cut the selected item to the clipboard, and Ctrl+V should paste it. What do you accomplish if every developer simply makes up his own? The user has to learn more arbitrary tricks that are completely useless outside of the scope of one application.
This lack of consistency is, in my humble opinion, the biggest reason that X (and desktop Linux in general) is such a mess. For all of its failings, Windows gets it mostly right, as do most of the larger commercial developers.
No one's advocating making everything completely the same. And I think it's pretty clear that you'll never see some things become completely intuitive. But that doesn't mean that starting over every time is the best approach. If I open up my new copy of Photoshop, I may not know it intimately, but I know that I can undo by pressing Ctrl+Z, I can open, create, save and close documents using the File menu, and I can press Ctrl+F4 to close single MDI windows. (At a more basic level, I also know that Photoshop stores image data in files. Paradigms like this, while they may seem obvious, also need to be standardized.) Any time spent relearning any of this to satisfy the whim of some developer who I've probably never even met is a complete waste.
If you like the idea of custom widgets or, ummm, "creative" interfaces, that's great. I'm sure there are important discoveries out there that we haven't found yet. Whatever works for you. Just don't expect other people to use your software if you don't go out of your way to make it useable.
I wouldn't recommend using anything but an RP server.
I play on a standard server, and I'm getting exceedingly tired of playing with idiots--you know, people with names like XxKillerxX (and I think I've seen at least four variants on the name "Sephiroth"), people who don't know how to play cooperatively (yesterday, some idiot paladin in my party aggro'd three enemies onto my mage character, ran over and opened the chest in their camp and left), people that are completely deficient in the English language, and 13-year olds in general.
RP servers can be a little weird, but I'm guessing that the idiot quotient is much lower. And having to role-play simply can't be as bad as enduring the shouts of a pre-pubescent level 10 idiot spending hours trying to beg his way into a level 30 elite quest group.
Yeah, I believe that the NFL deal also included exclusive rights to the NFLPA.
As for the MLB issue, losing team names and stadiums would be a huge problem. I don't care if I can use Curt Schilling if he's wearing a Boston Green Socks uniform and pitching in Boston Field.
EA's greedy exclusivity moves are causing a huge mess all across the genre--EA's MVP Baseball and Sony's MLB line were the best baseball games available, and if I get stuck with Take Two's inferior product (and it is vastly inferior), I'm going to be really pissed.
I was actually pleasantly surprised by the video hardware in the Mac Mini--there's an onboard Radeon 9200 with 32MB of dedicated video RAM. It's not top-of-the-line by any means, but it's certainly a step or two up from the CPU-taxing, shared-memory crap that you get on most bargain Intel PC's.
That's retarded. Does it look bad for NASA? Definitely. But does that absolve the kid of what he did? Absolutely not. You can't even make the case that he was just trying to expose a vulnerability, because he didn't try to contact them about it. It was for personal gain, plain and simple.
I consider myself to be pretty skilled with computers, and I don't doubt that I could probably break into systems like this if I tried. Of course, I could also probably successfully conduct a bank robbery if I tried. The point is that I don't do either, because it's illegal and I'm aware that there are serious consequences.
Also, the line that some people tend to draw between the real world and the digital world is not as thick or as clear-cut as you seem to think. The technician that had to clean up the mess was being paid with--guess--that's right, real tax money. My money, and probably yours, too. Not to mention the fact that every time NASA launches a shuttle, peoples' lives are at stake. And if you think that innocuous, seemingly unrelated incidents can't cause serious system-wide problems, then you obviously haven't done much debugging.
What the kid did was wrong. You know it. I know it. And in this case, I think that the punishment is quite adequate. In six months, he can get out and get on with his life. In the meantime, perhaps it will deter someone equally foolish from making the same mistake.
It might not be that much more bandwidth-intensive on a per-client basis, but it's a scale thing.
There are a lot of people out there that couldn't be bothered to set up a gaming PC and play Half-Life or Counter-Strike--it's not an easy thing to do if you don't know computers well. On the other hand, even Grandma could set up an XBox and sign in to Live.
The problem for ISP's lies in the fact that they have to oversell their bandwidth to generate a profit. There's a reason that cable can offer T3-esque speeds at a fraction of the cost. It isn't magic, they probably pay about the same amount for that bandwidth that you would independently. But since the typical home user probably consumes less than 1% of the available bandwidth of a T1 over a long period of time, well, you can see where I'm going with this.
The crux of the issue is that profitability and reliability for these ISPs depend on bandwidth utilization and network performance meeting a certain set of expectations, and online gaming may require more bandwidth than they'd projected. I sincerely doubt that this is the first time that cable and DSL providers have had to deal with this, and it certainly won't be the last.
I agree that it's a social problem. I blame the Republican party because they've been shamelessly exploiting the naive puritanism of these people for political gains.
If you look at the people behind the most recent "controversy," you'll find that they're all of the usual Republican suspects--the Christian Coalition, Rush Limbaugh, etc. The story didn't even really break until Wednesday; only two papers (both in Philadelphia) said anything about the clip on the day after the game. It took 24 hours of conservative chest-pounding and mock outrage to even turn it into an issue. The same thing happened when Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney in the third presidential debate and the GOP, after a few days of cold, quiet calculation, went completely berzerk. (If you watched the antecedent vice presidential debate, you may remember that John Edwards said something similar, and Dick Cheney actually thanked him "for your kind words about my daughter.") It's all being used to manipulate people who are too stupid, religious or undereducated to know better into supporting officials whose only real interest is to shovel as much money out of the Treasury and into their own pockets as they possibly can, at the expense of the rightful recipients of that money (i.e. the American taxpayers).
This really isn't about the FCC. I'm not sure how I feel about decency standards over public airwaves. I'd probably feel a lot more strongly about it if I had kids, but as long as they keep their hands off of everything that isn't going over the public airwaves, I really can't complain.
From your sig, it seems likely that you think the Republican and Democratic parties are identical. I (presumably) agree with you that Democratic legislators are a little too cozy with corporate interests, and that they've pulled their own share of political dirty tricks in the past. But the actions of the right wing and the Bush administration over the past four years are simply beyond the pale. They are unparallelled in American history, and it's partially because of their utilization of the FCC as a propaganda outlet that we all have to endure four more years of this shit. Sorry if I sound bitter, but, well, I am.
i really really hope ninty crakes some sort of hardware or wire so we can play our DS's ON a TV.
Wud be a really nice idea, but then again the 2 screens on 1 tv would have to be cut down and also you would still have to keep looking at your DS on a lot of games becuase of the touch screen so its kinda pointless in some ways!
still, for games like n4su2 and mario 64 wud be mint!!!!!!!!!
OK, given that the majority of the posts look a lot like that one, why the hell would anyone with half a brain take this seriously? It's obviously just interference coming from an improperly shielded cable. I'm sure the FCC will have something to say about this--well, they would if Michael Powell weren't so busy acting as the Christian right's moralistic attack dog, anyway...
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Problem is, WoW puts a lot more importance on that little number next to your name--your level--than it does on a player's ingenuity. I run a mage, so I can't speak for other classes, but my chance to hit an opponent even four levels higher than me is about 25%. No amount of brainpower or trickery can compensate for that.
Until they have Spider Solitaire, I'm not going anywhere. :)
I totally agree. That's why I find it so pointless when people talk about "bringing Linux to the masses." It's never going to happen, and I don't think it should.
I'm not talking about KDE vs. Gnome. The trouble is, at least the last time I had a desktop Linux install running, neither of those environments was terribly internally consistent. Or stable, for that matter. (Granted, it has been a while.) I've also found the memory and CPU requirements for desktop Linux to be equivalent to (or higher than) what Windows wants. And since I'm much more of a pragmatist than Richard Stallman, I guess that just leads me to ask, what's the point?
BTW, thank you for being the only responder thus far to not call me some manner of fucking moron. It definitely bolsters your case. :)
It's not a question of cognitive ability, and I'm quite capable of using Linux, thank you. It's actually my preferred OS for servers. But if you think it belongs on everyone's desktop (keeping in mind that people, as a whole, really suck with technology), you're clearly out of touch with reality.
Fuckface.
Nobody with half or more of a brain could possibly argue that windows has the best possible desktop out there
I never said that. I'm not sure that such a an abstract concept as "the best possible desktop" even exists. Do you drive the best possible car? Do you live in the best possible house? It's far, far too complex of an issue to be shoehorned into a linear scale like that.
The KDE and Gnome projects keep adding enhancements, bells, and whistles to make their desktop "better" than windows and then wonder why people still use wondows desktops.
It's because, as so many people fail to understand, it's not about bells and whistles. I don't need windowshade mode or alpha transparency. I'd much rather have a stable, consistent interface. But such things as consistency and stability are far from glamourous, and require strict project management and a good helping of elbow grease. It's not something I'd want to do in my spare time, and I don't fault others for feeling the same way. But without it, you just can't compete with the commercial offerings.
If you're going to use something as broken as a "desktop", why should you bother switching away from the one you already know.
Precisely. Especially when the new one, while stronger in some areas, has just as many flaws in others.
Speaking of having no fucking clue, you should look in the mirror.
INCINERATION! You're the insult master!
Have you ever used windows in a business environment? What kind of crack do you have to smoke to see windows applications, hell, even windows components as having a consistent interface.
Agreed. I don't think you can ever have an openly programmable environment in which all third-party developers follow all the rules. But Windows itself is generally consistent. There's usually a preferred "Windows way" of setting something up. In Linux, there are many different ways, each as legitimate as the next. Which is great for the person writing the code, but not so wonderful for everyone else involved.
Do that, and you'll have something that is truly better; something that it would be worth considering a switch to. Until you've done something like that, people will stay with windows.
Which is pretty much what I'm saying. Linux, as a desktop OS, offers no incentive for people to switch at the moment. And with the advent of Win2000/XP, Windows is stable enough to be tolerable. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but OS X notwithstanding, I think they offer the best current solution for a vast majority of people.
Why are people so obsessed with pushing Linux onto mainstream desktops, anyway? It seems to me that doing so would require eliminating a lot of what the geek community values in it in the first place.
It is precisely because of people like you that have no fucking clue what 99% of the world (some of us geeks included) wants in a desktop that Linux zealots have been fending off this argument for upwards of five years now.
Linux is absolutely not ready for the desktop. Until the community settles on a consistent interface and set of UI standards, it will never be ready for the desktop. For all the talk about how Microsoft is more committed to shiny new features than stability and consistency, they do a much, much better job than the OSS community in terms of UI. The controls in every window manager I've ever used have felt clunky and awkward. Shortcut keys are different in every application. And you've got 600,000 people each more interested in making their own window managers than in helping to develop a unified standard.
Which is fine. They're hobbyists, after all. But with that kind of attitude, Linux will always remain a hobbyist OS, and will never make it onto the desktop en masse.
The latter is very legal in VB. In every language I've ever seen, the expression in an if statement has to reduce to a boolean.
In all honesty, VB isn't as bad as people make it out to be. It certainly has a number of glaring weaknesses (particularly VB6, which is still in widespread use), but it's pretty useable as long as you pay attention to the inner workings of the language. Of course, it takes as much time to gain such an intimate knowledge of VB as it would to do so with a "real" language such as C++, so you really have to wonder what the point is.
I don't think any good programmer uses VB6 by choice (almost all good programmers I know are pretty language-agnostic to begin with), but when you have to use it, it's really not as miserable of an experience as people seem to think.
Most of the time, at least.
Oops, forgot to escape a less-than sign in the second paragraph. It should read:
I'd also like to know where that improved rate of return is going to come from, particularly since the overhead involved in privatization is much higher than the <1% overhead that the current system uses.
My problem with Bush's privatization plan is that he's flat-out lying. There really isn't a crisis; if nothing's changed, the system will remain solvent at least until 2042.
I'd also like to know where that improved rate of return is going to come from, particularly since the overhead involved in privatization is much higher than the
If Bush were taking part in a reasonable debate on the subject, I'd definitely listen to what he had to say. The way things are now, I get the feeling that there's nothing in this privatization plan other than a huge gift for his investment house buddies. If the facts are on your side, then what's with all the deception?
Well, sort of. That wasn't why I voted for Kerry, but by and large, I believe it to be true.
I voted for Kerry because of his economic, social and diplomatic agenda. It's pretty clear to me that if you're not in the top 10% income bracket, it's against your economic interest to vote Republican. My stance on a number of issues (such as abortion rights, the role of corporations in America, and the vital need for transparency in the democratic process) is also a lot closer to Kerry's.
Furthermore, I chose the major candidate who didn't have a history of syphoning money to the rich, lying to the American public to start a frivilous war (that just happened to funnel billions of dollars into the pockets of some of his biggest supporters), alienating almost all of our closest allies and blurring the line between church and state. I don't believe that John Kerry would have planted shills in the White House press room to lob softball questions at him. I don't think his subordinates would release government propaganda disguised as news reporting to hundreds of local news stations around the country. I don't think the Democratic Party would send checks to "journalists" in exchange for favorable write-ups. And I don't think John Kerry (or Al Gore, for that matter) would have run up a national deficit even half the size of the one we're looking at now.
The facts speak for themselves. I don't see how one could analyze these facts and not come to the conclusion that the presidency of George W. Bush has been a disaster for this country. The fact that this administration is far and away the most secretive in history doesn't bode well for them, either. But sadly, given that polls show that about half the country still thinks we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I don't think that the facts really have much to do with it anymore.
Good, Bush has leadership skills. Wonderful. That doesn't change the fact that his agenda is radically different than Kerry's. Do you think we'd be talking about Social Security privatization if Kerry were in office?
Whether you like it or not, you're choosing a lot more than a candidate's personality when you vote for president. The results of the presidential election essentially set the entire country's agenda for the next four years, particularly with a single party controlling both houses of Congress.
I do, however, agree with you that if you have no idea what you're doing (and most people in America clearly do not), stay the hell away from the voting booth.
That's not cool. Unless she's a total bitch, why do that to someone?
You're completely missing the point. Of everything. You're missing the point of why OSS graphics apps are virtually unuseable (sadly, they are), what he's proposing (only appropriate given that you haven't even read the article :), and the reason that most developers I know even write software in the first place (to solve a problem, not to express themselves in a creative way--although that is certainly part of what makes programming enjoyable).
Sure, all applications are different, but they all stick to some basic conventions. For instance, you'd be hard-pressed to find a (GUI-based) text editor that placed its Undo command anywhere but at the top of the Edit Menu in the menu bar. This is a good thing. It means that I have to learn less about the idiosyncracies of the software I'm using, and everything behaves the same. Ctrl+X should cut the selected item to the clipboard, and Ctrl+V should paste it. What do you accomplish if every developer simply makes up his own? The user has to learn more arbitrary tricks that are completely useless outside of the scope of one application.
This lack of consistency is, in my humble opinion, the biggest reason that X (and desktop Linux in general) is such a mess. For all of its failings, Windows gets it mostly right, as do most of the larger commercial developers.
No one's advocating making everything completely the same. And I think it's pretty clear that you'll never see some things become completely intuitive. But that doesn't mean that starting over every time is the best approach. If I open up my new copy of Photoshop, I may not know it intimately, but I know that I can undo by pressing Ctrl+Z, I can open, create, save and close documents using the File menu, and I can press Ctrl+F4 to close single MDI windows. (At a more basic level, I also know that Photoshop stores image data in files. Paradigms like this, while they may seem obvious, also need to be standardized.) Any time spent relearning any of this to satisfy the whim of some developer who I've probably never even met is a complete waste.
If you like the idea of custom widgets or, ummm, "creative" interfaces, that's great. I'm sure there are important discoveries out there that we haven't found yet. Whatever works for you. Just don't expect other people to use your software if you don't go out of your way to make it useable.
At what point did "manifesto" replace "common sense"?
Ohhh, sometime around 1997.
Ummm, to him it probably does.
I wouldn't recommend using anything but an RP server.
I play on a standard server, and I'm getting exceedingly tired of playing with idiots--you know, people with names like XxKillerxX (and I think I've seen at least four variants on the name "Sephiroth"), people who don't know how to play cooperatively (yesterday, some idiot paladin in my party aggro'd three enemies onto my mage character, ran over and opened the chest in their camp and left), people that are completely deficient in the English language, and 13-year olds in general.
RP servers can be a little weird, but I'm guessing that the idiot quotient is much lower. And having to role-play simply can't be as bad as enduring the shouts of a pre-pubescent level 10 idiot spending hours trying to beg his way into a level 30 elite quest group.
Yeah, I believe that the NFL deal also included exclusive rights to the NFLPA.
As for the MLB issue, losing team names and stadiums would be a huge problem. I don't care if I can use Curt Schilling if he's wearing a Boston Green Socks uniform and pitching in Boston Field.
EA's greedy exclusivity moves are causing a huge mess all across the genre--EA's MVP Baseball and Sony's MLB line were the best baseball games available, and if I get stuck with Take Two's inferior product (and it is vastly inferior), I'm going to be really pissed.
You won't be using this mini-Mac for gaming
I was actually pleasantly surprised by the video hardware in the Mac Mini--there's an onboard Radeon 9200 with 32MB of dedicated video RAM. It's not top-of-the-line by any means, but it's certainly a step or two up from the CPU-taxing, shared-memory crap that you get on most bargain Intel PC's.
How about price?
That's retarded. Does it look bad for NASA? Definitely. But does that absolve the kid of what he did? Absolutely not. You can't even make the case that he was just trying to expose a vulnerability, because he didn't try to contact them about it. It was for personal gain, plain and simple.
I consider myself to be pretty skilled with computers, and I don't doubt that I could probably break into systems like this if I tried. Of course, I could also probably successfully conduct a bank robbery if I tried. The point is that I don't do either, because it's illegal and I'm aware that there are serious consequences.
Also, the line that some people tend to draw between the real world and the digital world is not as thick or as clear-cut as you seem to think. The technician that had to clean up the mess was being paid with--guess--that's right, real tax money. My money, and probably yours, too. Not to mention the fact that every time NASA launches a shuttle, peoples' lives are at stake. And if you think that innocuous, seemingly unrelated incidents can't cause serious system-wide problems, then you obviously haven't done much debugging.
What the kid did was wrong. You know it. I know it. And in this case, I think that the punishment is quite adequate. In six months, he can get out and get on with his life. In the meantime, perhaps it will deter someone equally foolish from making the same mistake.
It might not be that much more bandwidth-intensive on a per-client basis, but it's a scale thing.
There are a lot of people out there that couldn't be bothered to set up a gaming PC and play Half-Life or Counter-Strike--it's not an easy thing to do if you don't know computers well. On the other hand, even Grandma could set up an XBox and sign in to Live.
The problem for ISP's lies in the fact that they have to oversell their bandwidth to generate a profit. There's a reason that cable can offer T3-esque speeds at a fraction of the cost. It isn't magic, they probably pay about the same amount for that bandwidth that you would independently. But since the typical home user probably consumes less than 1% of the available bandwidth of a T1 over a long period of time, well, you can see where I'm going with this.
The crux of the issue is that profitability and reliability for these ISPs depend on bandwidth utilization and network performance meeting a certain set of expectations, and online gaming may require more bandwidth than they'd projected. I sincerely doubt that this is the first time that cable and DSL providers have had to deal with this, and it certainly won't be the last.
I agree that it's a social problem. I blame the Republican party because they've been shamelessly exploiting the naive puritanism of these people for political gains.
If you look at the people behind the most recent "controversy," you'll find that they're all of the usual Republican suspects--the Christian Coalition, Rush Limbaugh, etc. The story didn't even really break until Wednesday; only two papers (both in Philadelphia) said anything about the clip on the day after the game. It took 24 hours of conservative chest-pounding and mock outrage to even turn it into an issue. The same thing happened when Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney in the third presidential debate and the GOP, after a few days of cold, quiet calculation, went completely berzerk. (If you watched the antecedent vice presidential debate, you may remember that John Edwards said something similar, and Dick Cheney actually thanked him "for your kind words about my daughter.") It's all being used to manipulate people who are too stupid, religious or undereducated to know better into supporting officials whose only real interest is to shovel as much money out of the Treasury and into their own pockets as they possibly can, at the expense of the rightful recipients of that money (i.e. the American taxpayers).
This really isn't about the FCC. I'm not sure how I feel about decency standards over public airwaves. I'd probably feel a lot more strongly about it if I had kids, but as long as they keep their hands off of everything that isn't going over the public airwaves, I really can't complain.
From your sig, it seems likely that you think the Republican and Democratic parties are identical. I (presumably) agree with you that Democratic legislators are a little too cozy with corporate interests, and that they've pulled their own share of political dirty tricks in the past. But the actions of the right wing and the Bush administration over the past four years are simply beyond the pale. They are unparallelled in American history, and it's partially because of their utilization of the FCC as a propaganda outlet that we all have to endure four more years of this shit. Sorry if I sound bitter, but, well, I am.
Here's an excerpt from the thread:
OK, given that the majority of the posts look a lot like that one, why the hell would anyone with half a brain take this seriously? It's obviously just interference coming from an improperly shielded cable. I'm sure the FCC will have something to say about this--well, they would if Michael Powell weren't so busy acting as the Christian right's moralistic attack dog, anyway...
IsNot, ummm, IsNot in VB. At least, not in VB6.