Wich means shopping outside my own country is out of the question.
I only care for MMO games especially since the answer exists. Just look at Sony. They use a company called GlobalCollect who make it their business to have payment system everywhere.
Sadly most companies online are american and they can't understand the concept of not having a credit card.
Oh well. Less chance of me wasting my money I suppose. Like on that oblivion horse armour. Credit card only you say? Oh well, wonder if someone already posted a torrent of it (and yes I did buy the original game, the collecters edition even)
Pretty smart Betheseda. Force a paying customer to piracy by not accepting non-credit card payments.
It is the reason I am wary of privacy freaks. To many of them seem to think privacy laws are there to protect criminals from getting caught. Sometimes that may be an unfortunate side-effect of protecting the innocent BUT ultimatly the goal must be to get a system that protects the innocent and ONLY the innocent. As long as we can't have a perfect system I think we should balance the need of protecting the innocent from wrongfull conviction VS the need to be able to convict the guilty.
The whole "it is better to let 10 guilty people go free then have 1 innocent man convicted" is a lot of crap. The current system sure succeeds in letting the 10 guilty go free but we still got innocent men (and women) in jail.
I don't have "the answer" but your crap about framing innocent kids sure as hell isn't it either. If the police finds a video with some kids committing a crime then they should be fully able to use it. Oh and as for forging it. Yeah right. Hang out on image boards for a second. It is filled with people who can tell you every photoshop trick. Shops never last long as evidence.
This is very very old police practice. When you get word of some "pub talk" you follow up on it.
It is not unusual for criminals to brag about their crimes to their friends. Suprise suprise for various reasons these friends may be inclined to then spread the info. Some even directly to the police because they are fucking disgusted with it. Others because they use the info to get away with their own lesser crime. Get picked up for a theft? Tell the arresting officer about that guy you heard bragging about a rape.
Off course nowadays people are so amazingly stupid they even record their own evidence and then make it publicly available. Kinda like walking into a police station and then confessing. Should there be some privacy law to protect the truly stupid?
Offcourse not.
As for people claiming that you shouldn't post personal information on the net if you don't want to get caught. Geez, get a clue. If you don't want to get caught. Don't commit the crime!
These kids are not "normal" teenagers doing stupid teenage things. When you start filming your "happy slappings" you have long since crossed the border into "insane criminal who needs to be locked up for life" territory.
Many people seem to see privacy laws as being there to protect you against getting caught. That is not what it is about. All those laws restricting the police are there to protect you against being falsly convicted FOR A CRIME YOU DID NOT COMMIT. It was never the idea to give you protection to get away with stuff. That is considered an unfortunate side-effect, not the goal itself.
IF there was a way to get perfect privacy with no people being able to get away with a crime THAT would be the holy grail of privacy laws.
to many times you see people trying to invoke pricacy laws to supress evidence off crimes they committed. "Yes yes, the evidence clearly shows I did it but you it is not fair you got that evidence". That is not a good thing.
Privacy freaks would get a lot more respect if they spend slightly more time defending the innocent vs the guilty. The average joe doesn't exactly give a damn that some criminals rights were violated. Just ask how many think that jail rape is a good thing.
The tv-series Gilligan Island was, to my knowledge, never aired in Holland. Yet it is constantly referenced in more recent, american, media. Off course when I was young the internet did not yet exist so I couldn't just google it.
I think I learned what the series was about by having seen parodies off it in other series along with the occasional clip in tv history programs.
Nowadays I could simple google it or look it up in wikipedia and I will know what the hell that obscure (to a dutchman) reference is about.
Remember the movie Rainman? It had a reference to an Abbet and Costello sketch with the rainman not getting the joke.
Well neither did I. Never having heard of the sketch before I had no idea what the fuck he was on about and just presumed he was rambling some script that made no sense. (he wasn't all that audible and the subber was apperently as confused as I was)
It is only years later when I learned about the sketch and heard it in full that I got "it". He was trying to really work out who was on first when it was clear too any normal person "who" was a joke name.
Does it matter that I didn't know this? No. Is it nice to be able to look things like this up nowadays. Yes.
This is the information age kiddo. That doesn't just mean info vital to our survival.
It can be just info that makes it easier to know what the fuck someone else is talking about. When you talk to people throughout the world it is very handy to have a place where you can simply look up trivial information as it saves a lot of time.
This is exactly what encyclopedia are for. Not for detailed info for researching complex chemical process but for getting quick lowdown on simple info that you just don't know.
Saying that an encyclopedia does not to need to include certain trivial articles is like saying a dictionary does not need to include trivial words.
I have no problems with honest ISP's who simply say "X for Y traffic and Xx2 for Yx2 traffic".
I on the other hand absolutely loath those ISP's who claim "unlimited" bandwidth wich in reality is "fair use" wich in reality is a few gigabyte.
Hell a few even in the year 2006 sell accounts with a 1 gig datalimit and charge a mint for going over it. Without offcourse CLEARLY spelling this out to the consumer.
Who then buys WoW or some other MMO game and then is suprised that the initial patch alone exceeds his limit (based on real life experiences)
I can understand the appeal of an ISP wanting to advertise with "unlimited" and then balking at the fact that some people take this literal but we got something called truth in advertising laws.
I just wish the legal system would spend more time enforcing them. Next time a customer is billed extra for going over the limit of his unlimited service the ISP should be slammed down with a million dollar fine for deceitfull advertising practises and deception. Maybe even fraud.
Then we can simply choose our ISP and contract based on our needs.
It seems to work for Mobile phone contracts. Allthough a strange thing is that mobile phone companies typically try to oversell you, giving you a contract for more minutes then you use. Why on earth then are ISP's trying constantly to undersell you? Must be the old IT rule of normal rules not applying.
I short I don't mind ISP setting restrictions just as long as they are honest and I can still buy my 300gb open ports account. In holland at least it seems there are at least a few ISP going after the no-nonsense users who don't like portals or other crap and just want a connection, fast and wide. You pay more but as I am now temporarily living in someone elses home and forced to use a crap ISP (tiscali) over my own (xs4all) I can see that although I payed twice as much it was worth every cent.
Sadly ISP's like tiscali are not in the business of selling you bandwidth. They want to be content handlers/providers making a fat load of profit of you not from putting through bits but by selling you their content services. Kinda like a telecom running its own sexlines (wich for mobile telecoms is in fact the case)
Tiscali doesn't even have binary usenet because "most of the content on usenet is pirated and we prefer our users to buy their content through us". Almost literal translation.
Sadly many people don't have a choice of ISP. This is bad but then that is what happens when you vote for capatalists who believe in letting the stall owners run the market (that is what the free market really is, giving the key to the market to the stall owners.)
Believe it or not but there was a time when IE was the second browser and all sites were optimized for Netscape instead. The proof of that is still visible today. Just look at IE browser indentification string.
Yes the mighty MS still pretends that IE is a Mozilla clone.
So what the fuck happened. Well a couple things. The easiest was that MS started to include IE by default even making it a core part of the OS (we are talking the era around the middle of 90's so this talk includes windows 3.1)
In those days when you signed up to an ISP it was not unusual to get a CD with browser software for you to install as they could not be certain you would already have a browser.
This made it much easier for netscape to "sell" its browser to ISP's to include on their installation CD (you most likely needed a bunch of other software as well not included by default with windows)
Because MS started to bundle the browser (and other network software) with the OS nowadays it is rare for an ISP to have an install CD.
This means that it is no longer possible for you to get different browser when you hook up to the net. Even if you know about other browsers and want one you will still use IE to download it.
But something else happened as well. Remember there was a time when every site was build around netscape and it was IE that had to pretend to be netscape.
So why was this followed by years of IE only sites?
Well netscape dropped the ball. Version 4 especially was a nightmare with bloat and bugs that made IE seem not all that bad after all. Or at least not bad enough for people to bother downloading a large install over a modem.
There was a long time when Netscape just wasn't worth it. Long enough for IE to take over. Not because it was that much better but it wasn't any worse either (well not at the time) so why should you download a replacement that is just as bad?
Some people say there is no similar market effect. I think there is. Car sound installations. While there is a high-tech market for after market sound systems for your car it is tiny compared to the pre-installed market.
For most of the standard cheap radio and speakers factory installed are apperantly good enough and the cost and time involved in upgrading to a product no matter how superior is just not worth it.
So does Firefox stand a chance.
Well perhaps.
After all a cheapo car radio doesn't kill you. No matter how much the boxes may distort your favorite music they do not allow anyone to drive off with your car.
IE on the other hand is the car equivelant of a start button in a convertible.
IF this insecurity ever becomes to much of a risk then in theory people themselves would look for ways to make their OS more secure.
Yeah right.
I mentioned cars for a reason. Check the history of safety belts. In all the seats of a car. The dangers of unrestrained kids/luggage/pets in an aciddent are well known (both to themselves and other passengers) yet people actually fight safety measures designed to save their lives.
So what change does Firefox have of being adopted because it might safe people from some software accidents?
When american car manufacturers refused to make secure cars did american car buyers enmass buy european/japanese cars instead?
No. Only when the fuel price became unbearable did this happen.
As always, money is the ultimate motivator. As long as IE doesn't cost people more then it costs them to install firefox (cost as in time, hazzle, having to think for a second) then IE will not be replaced.
Personally I switched from IE to opera for just this reason. Opera has the unique feature of being able to resume easily and cleanily from where it left off after a crash. IE cost me to much time by crashing just as I had found the site with free porn eh, the site with really usefull info. Opera saved me time.
Nothing to do with security. I knew enough to make IE secure. (This was back a few years whe
I can easily see the wests motivation for this meeting. 1 billion+ consumers.
You only have to look at the difference between america's threathment of Cuba (a couple of million consumers) vs China (over a billion consumers) t0 know what the US is about when it comes to world politics.
But what about China's motivation for this? China has been doing very well for itself following its own unique style of goverment.
While it ain't exactly communism it sure as hell isn't capatalism either. Neither has it given in on any subject to the west except a few trade disputes. It still claims taiwan as part of china, there is no religous freedom or freedom of the press (no broadcasting cnn china in China is NOT freedom of the press and only a tool would think so) and tibet is still occupied and its citizens repressed and prosecuted.
Only on trade disputes does it give in slightly agreeing to limit its exports from time to time in the full knowledge that the west has little choice but to allow the increase in time because our economic systems know totally depend on china's cheap goods. The recent trade dispute over clothes in the EU showed that. EU goverment wanted to limit the import from china to give its own manufacturers a chance when in reality this meant that stores could not get stock (or rather could not get stock wich they could sell at a profit).
So back to China's motivation. We have been getting stories about China going with Linux instead of windows. Was this all a bluff to get a better deal from Microsoft?
Possible but does China need to do that? It can just use the rampant piracy as a bargaining chip. Either you sell us windows really cheap or we just pirate it. What is Gates going to do? Boycott china? Good luck, I am sure the US would love a real tradewar with China. Especially considering how much of its hardware for a real war comes from that area (no not china, taiwan, one nuke away)
China has done very well ignoring the whole copyright and intellectual property and patent crap (just check the story behind leaking capacitators on cheap chinese motherboards) so why should it chance now?
Is China seeing more opportunity for itself by changing? The recent move to require a licensed OS on each PC could be a sign that the Chinese goverment has decided a different approach is need to achieve its goals. What ever they might be I very much doubt they have anything to do with Bill Gates concerns or wishes.
I think that China is coming to visit with its own agenda and unless the american leader, and George Bush, are very carefull they are going to be taken for a ride.
Why do I think so?
Well China has only got to look west (no not the US you idiot, russia is to china's west, the US is to the east) to see what choice it has.
The soviet union did what the US wanted and tried to become a western capatlist democracy and that worked out well didn't it?
So China got a clear choice, follow the western path of "democracy and capatalism" and follow the USSR into economic ruin and war OR continue on its own path wich so far has been making it a very large fortune and in ever tighter control off the western economies.
Any negiotator knows you need to check why the other party doesn't want to do what you want them to do. That is obvious. Yet a really smart negiotator knows that you should be even more wary of the other parties motivations of doing exactly what you want them to do.
If China clamps down on piracy and installs windows on every machine you can be very sure it is not because it makes Bill Gates happy.
I find it very hard to believe that China would willingly hand over its entire IT future to an american company. The only possible reason I can see is that MS software could be more easily used to spy on its citizens (open source linux makes this far harder)
Mmm, perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Chinese and American intrest are the same after all.
If you read the article you can read that this vcr was a X+1 technology. Not only does the article mention two previous video recorders from wich lessons were learned it also makes the link that a video recorder is just a audio recorder +1
Neither did it create a truly new product kinescope already existed and provided a pretty similar function. Just slower.
So what this really proves is that most tech is based on other tech and that devices wich the average human considers revolutionary are in fact evolutionary.
Funny that even after reading an article that constantly mentions how the various parts of the video recorder existed before you still claim to be innovative.
It is, but because they got existing tech to work better and together.
It is this censorship that has "forced" some japanese to be more inventive when it comes to making porn. Rather then just a closeup that would make a gynecologist wince they have instead got to think about a setup. A story if you like.
Granted some japanese porn still has closeups wich results in one big censored screen but it is offset by the absolutly weird stuff the companies like Soft in Demand come up with.
For instance their Deep Kiss series is totally hot yet has no censorship. Because it doesn't have any nudity. Thats right. Porn with no nudity. ONLY in Japan!
On a more serious note. A lot of japanese porn seems to obsess with rape. Offcourse the only way I know about it is because westerners share it via torrents so it is hardly limited to the west BUT I can imagine that someone in japan is worried about it.
In the game section too there are plenty of rape games. Games the make GTA seem very tame indeed.
The problem is that even if these violent games do have an effect on people what are you going to do? Plenty of stuff affects people badly. Religion is one. Just check all the holy wars we have and been having. Lots of people get in trouble because of alcohol as well.
Yet do we ban religion or booze? No.
We accept the price of some people being unable to deal with it as worth paying so the majority can maintain their freedom.
Then again alcohol is moderated and the church (at least in the west) is kept on a tight leash. Perhaps it is time to accept that games should be controlled as well. You know with like an age limit system so violent/sexual games can only be legally bought by people of the right age.
Oh that already exists?
Part of me is horrified by the notion of restricting free speech. Just replace "game" with "book" and most people would be very upset if you started banning fiction based on content.
On the other hand, what kind of person plays a rape sim anyway? Well me offcourse, else how would I know about them, but only once and then I just stayed the fuck away. Still I am not likely to rape in real life (oh okay since I am a nerd even a teenage girl could beat me up) even after playing.
In europe the driving license laws are being upgraded to be the same across the EU. One of the changes is that now all the countries will have a limit as to what class of motorcycle you can drive depending on your age (and a bit on how much experience you got).
It is in reaction to the "problem" of young people getting on powerfull bikes and killing themselves.
Strangely it is not much of a problem. First of all the accidents are rare since powerfull bikes are very very expensive and very hard to drive when drunk (you fall over wich is embarrising but rarely lethal).
The accidents that do happen are solo. Meaning the idiot eh sorry young biker kills himself and noone else. So who gives a hit. Evolution in action.
Yet to curb this limited problem personal freedom is sacrificed. Yet powerfull cars are not limited. Yet these do cause far more deaths often NOT of the young driver causing the accident.
Strange eh. Cars driving by the majority are unregulated, motor cycles NOT being driving by the majority are regulated.
Games make people violent. This is a fact.
Soccer matches make lots more people violent. So violent city centers have to be closed off by the police as soccer fans rampage through the streets.
Games played by a "minority" are regulated. Soccer watched by a majority is not.
I am getting a HUGE flash of insight here. Could it be that politcians are only intrested in regulating/banning stuff that is NOT seen to be enjoyed by a majority?
Perhaps not, it is too simple BUT I do think that going after games is too easy an answer. Not that I got an answer. Live is a bitch.
What you mean is people who buy all products from the bazaar and then relist them at a higher price. That is generally considered a bad thing although it is very common in the real world. I think it is called "speculating" or something.
That is not what I did. I bought bulk from out of the way places then distributed them to key spot and sold them in small portions.
So I provided two services. I helped people avoid having to buy 20 of something wich they could not afford. AND I put it in locations they were at.
In real life that is what a distributor does. Or perhaps the term is wholesaler. A supermarket chain buys potatoes by the ton from a remote farmer then sells them in handy 5 kilo packages at a shop near your home.
In return he ads a small percentage. In my case 10-20%. Those who didn't want it could always go to the farmer/chef themselves and cough up the credits for a crate of 20 units themselves as well as take the 20 minute round trip.
So I think it is a little different what I did from what you describe. I admit I got a handfull of emails crying foul but far more positive feedback from people who appreciated not having to do their own shopping. Same as most people like their supermarket despite the fact that 30 minute trip will get you potatoes at half the price.
Simply put, what came first. The chicken or the egg.
Is the fact that these "kids" play GTA because they are already inclined to activities that are illegal in their legal system OR does the game make them inclined?
Simply put, do violent games make people aggresive OR do aggresive people play violent games.
The problem is that "violent game" is such a vague term. Almost all games are violent but 99% of the time you are the good guy fighting the legions of evil.
GTA San Andreas has you drowning a rapper and his girlfriend because your mate didn't get his rap accepted.
What is worse, I even seen a GTA fan applaud the game for giving you a more clearcut hero. Right, massmurder because some untalented prick is upset about being rejected is a rolemodel.
If you then tell me that violent nutters play GTA and GTA makes violent nutters I can see how you could reach that conclusion.
Most people probably play the game the same way as they watch a over the top hong kong violent movie. They know it is totally fake mindless entertainment with no basis in real life.
Then again there are always a few who can't seperate real life from fiction. Who think that what happens in movies, books and games is real or at least a rolemodel for real life.
Take the movie "fight club". Some see it as a fun movie, some see it as the best of movies but some see it as a good idea.
But is it the movie that made them that way OR is it just an outlet?
Frankly I don't know. The "easiest" and favored by slashdot is that it is unrelated. I think at minimum you could diagnose a violent person by the amount of violent media they consume.
The media loves to claim the other extreme that violent games make a non-violent person violent.
The truth may be the horrible notion that violent games or movies or books are the catalyst for violent behaviour. Not so much creating violent people but setting them off. Pushing them just over the edge.
But what can we do? We can offcourse ban violent products but where do you draw the line? You can bet that the moment you agree a line must be drawn you will then be constantly fighting a battle over where to draw it with constant pressure to ban more and more.
Perhaps what is needed is the far more difficult answer. That we accept that some people just don't "fit" and either need to be removed from this world (death/lockup) OR be "cured" to "fit".
I am currently doing work wich takes me out on the streets a lot and into contact with people at their houses. There are a lot of nutters about. People unable to cope with the world as it is. Some turn in on themselves and eventually are discovered as a rotting corpse in tons of filth (and I mean tons, metric) OR they turn violent and sooner or later are arrested, locked up for a short time and then released again only to get worse.
The last couple of decades the western world by and large has been scrimping and saving on social care while the pressures of living in the west have only increased. From my current work I really get the idea that things have been pushed to far and that we are sitting on a timebomb of mentally unstable people who just can't cope with live.
Does a mentally unstable person unable to control his temper living in a society unwilling to correct him with a firm hand REALLY need to play a video game that glorifies uncontrolled meaningless violence?
No the game did not make that person that way. We did. But you can't tell me that a game like GTA is helping.
Offcourse if you accept what I say as true then there is a problem. The solution is gonna cost lots of money (tax payers money) and doesn't have a handy scapegoat (well the taxpayer who preffered to get meaningless taxcutts over providing aid to mentally unstable people).
Far easier just to cry "GTA makes killers" and for the gamers to cry "no it doesn't". No massive social aid needed to get unstable people readjusted. Just good headlines that sell ads while the timebomb i
Oh sure you can bemoan about how one could possibly find pixels arousing or how this gives the industry a bad name but in the meantime Second Life is one of the few ROLE playing games out there.
Not level grinding games like WoW or Everquest.
An MMORPG is not like a single player RPG. You will never be the farm boy/girl who saves the kingdom and marries the princess. You can't be the hero in an epic story that changes the fate of an entire continent.
An MMORPG is instead about living a live in an alternate universe.
Those who complain that some people are using Second Live to escape their real live are idiots.
Because of cause that is why people play games especially computer games. You don't think Michael Schumacher plays F1 games do you? WW2 veterans do not play Medal of Honor (or if they do find it boring and unrealistic to the extreme) and so on. People with exciting lives do not watch TV and do not play games. That is something for the rest of us to do. TV/Computers games, the opium of the masses.
An MMORPG is a second live for escaping your normal live. How deep and in what way depends on the person. To some just "levelling" up, raiding dungeons and looting stuff is all they want.
Others want more but it is a rare game that gives them the possibilty.
I played Star Wars Galaxies (Before combat upgrade made me leave) and later Everquest 2 (anyone feeling the need to recommend other MMORPG's please check wether they can be paid without a credit card first) and after that Guild Wars.
The last two don't hold a candle in respects to "role" playing.
I probably don't mean the same thing with roleplaying as most people. I am not talking about those people that roleplay a scout or a wizard in Everquest. Or those that roleplay rebel scum or a imperial scriptkiddie. (Oh be honest, have you ever met a mature imperial?)
No, I mean those who went beyond the title of their character sheet and roleplayed a trader or a explorer or a outfitter.
I played a trader, I liked exploring the planets and this often led me to unvisited shops wich usually had some stock going unsold. Easy to buy it and then resell it at hotspots for a slight margin. Food and drinks (buffs in swg) were espcially good. Few players had the dedication to prepare by stocking up before a mission so typical SWG fare was.
Player1: "All ready to go to the most lethal planet in the galaxy to go hunt the most lethal critter known?"
Player2: "Yeah yeah yeah lets go already enough time delaying"
Player1: "Okay we arrived, lets move out to the first lair"
Player2: "Give me some brandy I ran out"
Player1 + 3-9: "we are all on our last bottle too"
Cue my little character stocking the bazaars at the out of the way destinations with quality, pricey but quality brandy. Oh and in 1 bottle portions so as not to overtax those who spend all their money on a overpriced weapon.
It was in a way a lot of fun. Others I knew got a kick out of constantly checking what resources were being dropped. One guy seemed to be very good at finding players for missions. If you were missing a doc or a bio engineer etc for a raid, he could find someone willing to join.
In short the game allowed you to play more then just the "hero" prototypes.
If you ever wonder why SWG fans bemoan the New Game Experience it is because they removed the freedoms to play those other characters.
SWG was a girl heavy game with a lot of them having a sideline in dressmaking. I was better dressed in game then in real life.
So to me, hookers and pimps and johns in a MMO game doesn't sound bad at all. Not because of the sex but because these people found a way to play the game wich goes beyond what is in the manual.
Anyway it is nothing new. The sims online had an article about an underaged hooker.
A good MMORPG will be more then just grinding levels and raiding dungeons. Not that there is anything wrong with that but DDO to be fair can be seen as nothing mo
No wonder Bill Gates doesn't believe in the 100 dollar laptop. He is supplying the world with PC's that cost you a fraction of a cent.
Only kidding of course, well partially. How many botnets consist of linux or OS-X machines?
It does however show just how hopeless windows security is. Even criminals have costs so if they can make a profit after paying their hosting and electricity and hardware and man power with just 25 dollar per 10 thousand machines then the cost and labour of infecting a windows machine must truly be trivial.
Lets face it the mafia doesn't do it for penny profits. They are not supermarkets surviving on a 1 cent per sale profit. They want millions and they want them now.
How many times $25 does it take to intrest a mobster?
Frankly I don't think the problem is going to go away. The idea that MS is ever going to provide a secure OS is laughable and even if they did nothing helps against a dimwitted user who happily installs anything if it promises a nudie picture.
They only two easy solutions I see is to install a serious watchdog on the net. One who can kick off ISP's that host the mob AND users who let their PC's get infected.
Would that be workable? Even "respectable" western ISP's barely respond to complaints about attacks. We got a spam watchdog that already kicks of ISP off the email net when they misbehave and this just barely works. If the same was applied officially to the net as a whole entire parts of the world would be disconnected.
Perhaps it is just something we got to live with. The real live mafia never went away. Why should the net be any different. As long as their is money to made people will attempt to get it.
The simplest has already been mentioned. Copyright. I can't imagine any site supported by ad revenues being happy at having their site copied and served by someone else. Especially if they use their own ads. Just look at the complaints google gets for its caching and indexing.
But even worse is how the hell am I going to get even semi uptodate news? The service don't know what I am going to want to read so I have to download ALL the news before I go offline ONLY to then have only old news on my system.
Sure there are times when I wish I could visit a site without a net connection. Most notably a help site that tells me how to get my connection back.
But for the rest? You would be lugging around a shitload of data in the hope that one day you need to search something while offline and then hope that it is in the cache AND that it is still relevant.
It reminds me off those old programs we in europe had in the days of modems. Since we had to pay per minute connected it often made sense to download all your favorite pages as fast as possible and then read them offline. I for instance had it setup to get the various webcomics and such in one go so I only paid for a few minutes what would have cost me at least half an hour online.
I can still see the same for modern times. When you arrive at an hotspot your computer quickly downloads the pages you regurarly visit and gets the data so you can read them later when you might have left the hotspot.
But downloading ALL the web? No, to much data that to be transferred that you will never use anyway.
I can see how they arrived at the idea but I think that they should have stopped before they arrived at the point they decided to cache the web. Develop a program that can easily download the pages you are very likely to want to read when the laptop happens to be connected for off line reading and leave it at that.
NO "big" distro is going to have a lean trim kernel because they need to include everything and the kitchen sink just to make sure their distro runs on the majority of machines.
So default kernels are bloated.
However the moment you compile your own OR can fine tune a distro to one specific set of hardware you can cut a lot of crap out.
Take the simplest of things. Module support. Only needed if you load modules and modules are only really needed by developers OR if you want to include all the modules for say all the soundcards and load the right one at boot.
If you know wich modules you need you can just compile them in and skip all the module support.
Same with a lot of things.
A fine tuned kernel is a lot smaller.
The proof? Linux runs on tiny computers like switches and watches and phones and pda's.
Linux the source code is big and feature rich.
Linux the kernel is as fat or as slim as you want it to be.
Fighting for the revolution may be nothing more to the individual then to be hit in the head by a few grams of lead.
Ghandi's "war" wasn't exactly bloodless either. For many of his people it ended with "then they fight you" but for india as a whole it became "and then you win".
It is the reason why people standing up to fight for something are so rare. Because it is so bloody likely that you will be standing all alone when it comes to "then they fight you".
Many westerners are now bitterly complaining about their goverments becoming more like dictatorships. However to take up arms against them means that you better have a lot of people doing the same thing at the same time or instead of a brave freedom fighter of the revolution your just a lone nutcase with a gun.
I think they call it public transport although what you in the colonies call it I have no idea.
Amazingly public transport companies park their vehicles outside the city as well. Not many bus depots in the city centers.
Oh and taxi's also serve a similar function. I believe they paint them yellow over there instead of the normal black that civilized people use.
While your idea sounds nice it has just one small drawback. If you equip every car with it you have just doubled the traffic in and out of the city center. Your car driving you to your work and then driving itself out to a parking lot. The last thing busy cities need is more traffic.
Oh and an other version of truly "self parking" cars? Getting a ride with a co-worker. Drops me off in front of the office. All it costs is to make two cups of coffee.
That is odd. Since if I want to play Oblivion I need to upgrade the hardware from a regular x-box (wich played Morrowind) to a 360.
Yet I still use the same PC that I played Morrowind on to play Oblivion.
Anyway they charge for the PC addons as well.
The problem I see with the addons is that you really have to question value for money. Considering how much content there is in the game (2 dozen armour sets alone) can you really justify 1/25th of the total game price for just an extra set of armour?
There is an old economic lesson that teaches you that you should not try to squeeze every dime from a customer. If you do, they will get upset and sooner or later, if they get the chance, rebell.
Take the european fixed line monopolies. They charged for everything INCLUDING stuff that used to be free (directory enquiries used to be 100% free, then only free from phoneboots now it costs a couple of euro for a single lookup).
They used to get away with it. Until internet telephones came along and now KPN (dutch monopolist) is starting to really feel the hurt as multiple competitors have emerged that simply state in their ads "we allow you to get rid of KPN forever". It sells like hotcakes.
With games it is even easier. I bought oblivion in the shop. I do not got a credit card (it is a european thing, americans do not even bother to try to understand, you can't) and I want that mod. Gee, what to do, what to do.
Oh I now. Download it from a torrent. Betheseda, I bought every elder scroll game, this one is that last. Next one to enter my home will do so over the internet gratis.
The more people go the fire instead of the exits the less change I got of being stuck in a mass of people all trying to fit through a small exit.
It is a form of evolution I suppose. There are two kinds of people. Those that go and see what makes that growling sound in the back of the cave and those that spend the night in a tree and have kids.
The X-box had live. Didn't help it. The PS2 didn't. It is the clear winner of the previous generation.
So now the new x-box has live and all of a sudden it is gonna make a huge difference? Why?
Frankly it is only in the intrest of the console makers and game makers that a single console wins.
For the consumers if one company would really win it would mean the end of choice. Do we really want Sony OR MS OR Nintendo to achieve the same kind of absolute control over console gaming that MS has over PC gaming?
Lets face it. Vista ain't out yet. Won't be for consumers for another year. That is if no further delays happen.
So by then we will have seen the fading out of of 256mb machines and gone to 512mb. (Even the cheapest Dell now has that already) Wich is happily the recommended minimum. In fact many Dells already come with 1 gig as do a lot of "cheapo" white brand PC's.
As for CPU. Well thanks to the move to Dual core's in 1 year I think single core machines will be rare. Why go single when a dual costs only 10 bucks extra?
The only real problem may be with the 3D card needed for the new gui. Except that I have been led to believe that it is optional and you can still use the old gui wich does not require a 3D card.
So basically, any halfway decent machine will do but as always you need lots of ram.
So what else is new? This has been true for opensource as well. You are not going to run KDE with all the options on a 486 with 16mb memory.
What I want is a sticker that says wether the hardware is DRM ready. That is the thing I am intrested in for Windows Vista.
Not in the way MS/Intel/etc wants. Just so I know wich products to avoid like the plague.
A nice shiny sticker "Big Brother Ready" so we can let them rot on the shops shelves.
We took the fast out of fast food. In fact the "slow food" places like McD and Burger King are were you probably spend the most time waiting to get your meal.
As for this whole ATM idea that becomes a small store. Well, surely paying your bills through it is only for the poor (else you would just let your bank do it for free) who can only pay with cash. 1.75-3 dollars seems like the extra banks charge here if you want to pay a bill cash as the counter instead of through the mail from your account.
As for other services. Yeah great. Internet access through an ATM? Talk about a waste of hardware. You got a small bank vault, a complex teller machine sitting idle while somebody is browing goatse and 20 fuming customers behind him waiting to withdraw cash?
Couple that with the fact that an awfull lot of people are already confused enough by regular cash dispensers and this sounds like a really bad idea.
Then again what do I know. Maybe people said the same things about the original ATM's.
Slashdot Mirror
Wich means shopping outside my own country is out of the question.
I only care for MMO games especially since the answer exists. Just look at Sony. They use a company called GlobalCollect who make it their business to have payment system everywhere.
Sadly most companies online are american and they can't understand the concept of not having a credit card.
Oh well. Less chance of me wasting my money I suppose. Like on that oblivion horse armour. Credit card only you say? Oh well, wonder if someone already posted a torrent of it (and yes I did buy the original game, the collecters edition even)
Pretty smart Betheseda. Force a paying customer to piracy by not accepting non-credit card payments.
If you're dumb enough to post incriminating material on the internets you deserve to get caught.
This statement is ecchoed by a lot of people nowadays. It says a lot about our society and why some think it is going down the crapper.
If your a programmer you will understand what the problem with it is.
THEREFORE
So basically your saying that intelligent people do not deserve to be caught.
Funny, I always thought that a really could legal system would work like this.
It is the reason I am wary of privacy freaks. To many of them seem to think privacy laws are there to protect criminals from getting caught. Sometimes that may be an unfortunate side-effect of protecting the innocent BUT ultimatly the goal must be to get a system that protects the innocent and ONLY the innocent. As long as we can't have a perfect system I think we should balance the need of protecting the innocent from wrongfull conviction VS the need to be able to convict the guilty.
The whole "it is better to let 10 guilty people go free then have 1 innocent man convicted" is a lot of crap. The current system sure succeeds in letting the 10 guilty go free but we still got innocent men (and women) in jail.
I don't have "the answer" but your crap about framing innocent kids sure as hell isn't it either. If the police finds a video with some kids committing a crime then they should be fully able to use it. Oh and as for forging it. Yeah right. Hang out on image boards for a second. It is filled with people who can tell you every photoshop trick. Shops never last long as evidence.
It is not unusual for criminals to brag about their crimes to their friends. Suprise suprise for various reasons these friends may be inclined to then spread the info. Some even directly to the police because they are fucking disgusted with it. Others because they use the info to get away with their own lesser crime. Get picked up for a theft? Tell the arresting officer about that guy you heard bragging about a rape.
Off course nowadays people are so amazingly stupid they even record their own evidence and then make it publicly available. Kinda like walking into a police station and then confessing. Should there be some privacy law to protect the truly stupid?
Offcourse not.
As for people claiming that you shouldn't post personal information on the net if you don't want to get caught. Geez, get a clue. If you don't want to get caught. Don't commit the crime!
These kids are not "normal" teenagers doing stupid teenage things. When you start filming your "happy slappings" you have long since crossed the border into "insane criminal who needs to be locked up for life" territory.
Many people seem to see privacy laws as being there to protect you against getting caught. That is not what it is about. All those laws restricting the police are there to protect you against being falsly convicted FOR A CRIME YOU DID NOT COMMIT. It was never the idea to give you protection to get away with stuff. That is considered an unfortunate side-effect, not the goal itself.
IF there was a way to get perfect privacy with no people being able to get away with a crime THAT would be the holy grail of privacy laws.
to many times you see people trying to invoke pricacy laws to supress evidence off crimes they committed. "Yes yes, the evidence clearly shows I did it but you it is not fair you got that evidence". That is not a good thing.
Privacy freaks would get a lot more respect if they spend slightly more time defending the innocent vs the guilty. The average joe doesn't exactly give a damn that some criminals rights were violated. Just ask how many think that jail rape is a good thing.
The tv-series Gilligan Island was, to my knowledge, never aired in Holland. Yet it is constantly referenced in more recent, american, media. Off course when I was young the internet did not yet exist so I couldn't just google it.
I think I learned what the series was about by having seen parodies off it in other series along with the occasional clip in tv history programs.
Nowadays I could simple google it or look it up in wikipedia and I will know what the hell that obscure (to a dutchman) reference is about.
Remember the movie Rainman? It had a reference to an Abbet and Costello sketch with the rainman not getting the joke.
Well neither did I. Never having heard of the sketch before I had no idea what the fuck he was on about and just presumed he was rambling some script that made no sense. (he wasn't all that audible and the subber was apperently as confused as I was)
It is only years later when I learned about the sketch and heard it in full that I got "it". He was trying to really work out who was on first when it was clear too any normal person "who" was a joke name.
Does it matter that I didn't know this? No. Is it nice to be able to look things like this up nowadays. Yes.
This is the information age kiddo. That doesn't just mean info vital to our survival.
It can be just info that makes it easier to know what the fuck someone else is talking about. When you talk to people throughout the world it is very handy to have a place where you can simply look up trivial information as it saves a lot of time.
This is exactly what encyclopedia are for. Not for detailed info for researching complex chemical process but for getting quick lowdown on simple info that you just don't know.
Saying that an encyclopedia does not to need to include certain trivial articles is like saying a dictionary does not need to include trivial words.
I on the other hand absolutely loath those ISP's who claim "unlimited" bandwidth wich in reality is "fair use" wich in reality is a few gigabyte.
Hell a few even in the year 2006 sell accounts with a 1 gig datalimit and charge a mint for going over it. Without offcourse CLEARLY spelling this out to the consumer.
Who then buys WoW or some other MMO game and then is suprised that the initial patch alone exceeds his limit (based on real life experiences)
I can understand the appeal of an ISP wanting to advertise with "unlimited" and then balking at the fact that some people take this literal but we got something called truth in advertising laws.
I just wish the legal system would spend more time enforcing them. Next time a customer is billed extra for going over the limit of his unlimited service the ISP should be slammed down with a million dollar fine for deceitfull advertising practises and deception. Maybe even fraud.
Then we can simply choose our ISP and contract based on our needs.
It seems to work for Mobile phone contracts. Allthough a strange thing is that mobile phone companies typically try to oversell you, giving you a contract for more minutes then you use. Why on earth then are ISP's trying constantly to undersell you? Must be the old IT rule of normal rules not applying.
I short I don't mind ISP setting restrictions just as long as they are honest and I can still buy my 300gb open ports account. In holland at least it seems there are at least a few ISP going after the no-nonsense users who don't like portals or other crap and just want a connection, fast and wide. You pay more but as I am now temporarily living in someone elses home and forced to use a crap ISP (tiscali) over my own (xs4all) I can see that although I payed twice as much it was worth every cent.
Sadly ISP's like tiscali are not in the business of selling you bandwidth. They want to be content handlers/providers making a fat load of profit of you not from putting through bits but by selling you their content services. Kinda like a telecom running its own sexlines (wich for mobile telecoms is in fact the case)
Tiscali doesn't even have binary usenet because "most of the content on usenet is pirated and we prefer our users to buy their content through us". Almost literal translation.
Sadly many people don't have a choice of ISP. This is bad but then that is what happens when you vote for capatalists who believe in letting the stall owners run the market (that is what the free market really is, giving the key to the market to the stall owners.)
Yes the mighty MS still pretends that IE is a Mozilla clone.
So what the fuck happened. Well a couple things. The easiest was that MS started to include IE by default even making it a core part of the OS (we are talking the era around the middle of 90's so this talk includes windows 3.1)
In those days when you signed up to an ISP it was not unusual to get a CD with browser software for you to install as they could not be certain you would already have a browser.
This made it much easier for netscape to "sell" its browser to ISP's to include on their installation CD (you most likely needed a bunch of other software as well not included by default with windows)
Because MS started to bundle the browser (and other network software) with the OS nowadays it is rare for an ISP to have an install CD.
This means that it is no longer possible for you to get different browser when you hook up to the net. Even if you know about other browsers and want one you will still use IE to download it.
But something else happened as well. Remember there was a time when every site was build around netscape and it was IE that had to pretend to be netscape.
So why was this followed by years of IE only sites?
Well netscape dropped the ball. Version 4 especially was a nightmare with bloat and bugs that made IE seem not all that bad after all. Or at least not bad enough for people to bother downloading a large install over a modem.
There was a long time when Netscape just wasn't worth it. Long enough for IE to take over. Not because it was that much better but it wasn't any worse either (well not at the time) so why should you download a replacement that is just as bad?
Some people say there is no similar market effect. I think there is. Car sound installations. While there is a high-tech market for after market sound systems for your car it is tiny compared to the pre-installed market.
For most of the standard cheap radio and speakers factory installed are apperantly good enough and the cost and time involved in upgrading to a product no matter how superior is just not worth it.
So does Firefox stand a chance.
Well perhaps.
After all a cheapo car radio doesn't kill you. No matter how much the boxes may distort your favorite music they do not allow anyone to drive off with your car.
IE on the other hand is the car equivelant of a start button in a convertible.
IF this insecurity ever becomes to much of a risk then in theory people themselves would look for ways to make their OS more secure.
Yeah right.
I mentioned cars for a reason. Check the history of safety belts. In all the seats of a car. The dangers of unrestrained kids/luggage/pets in an aciddent are well known (both to themselves and other passengers) yet people actually fight safety measures designed to save their lives.
So what change does Firefox have of being adopted because it might safe people from some software accidents?
When american car manufacturers refused to make secure cars did american car buyers enmass buy european/japanese cars instead?
No. Only when the fuel price became unbearable did this happen.
As always, money is the ultimate motivator. As long as IE doesn't cost people more then it costs them to install firefox (cost as in time, hazzle, having to think for a second) then IE will not be replaced.
Personally I switched from IE to opera for just this reason. Opera has the unique feature of being able to resume easily and cleanily from where it left off after a crash. IE cost me to much time by crashing just as I had found the site with free porn eh, the site with really usefull info. Opera saved me time.
Nothing to do with security. I knew enough to make IE secure. (This was back a few years whe
You only have to look at the difference between america's threathment of Cuba (a couple of million consumers) vs China (over a billion consumers) t0 know what the US is about when it comes to world politics.
But what about China's motivation for this? China has been doing very well for itself following its own unique style of goverment.
While it ain't exactly communism it sure as hell isn't capatalism either. Neither has it given in on any subject to the west except a few trade disputes. It still claims taiwan as part of china, there is no religous freedom or freedom of the press (no broadcasting cnn china in China is NOT freedom of the press and only a tool would think so) and tibet is still occupied and its citizens repressed and prosecuted.
Only on trade disputes does it give in slightly agreeing to limit its exports from time to time in the full knowledge that the west has little choice but to allow the increase in time because our economic systems know totally depend on china's cheap goods. The recent trade dispute over clothes in the EU showed that. EU goverment wanted to limit the import from china to give its own manufacturers a chance when in reality this meant that stores could not get stock (or rather could not get stock wich they could sell at a profit).
So back to China's motivation. We have been getting stories about China going with Linux instead of windows. Was this all a bluff to get a better deal from Microsoft?
Possible but does China need to do that? It can just use the rampant piracy as a bargaining chip. Either you sell us windows really cheap or we just pirate it. What is Gates going to do? Boycott china? Good luck, I am sure the US would love a real tradewar with China. Especially considering how much of its hardware for a real war comes from that area (no not china, taiwan, one nuke away)
China has done very well ignoring the whole copyright and intellectual property and patent crap (just check the story behind leaking capacitators on cheap chinese motherboards) so why should it chance now?
Is China seeing more opportunity for itself by changing? The recent move to require a licensed OS on each PC could be a sign that the Chinese goverment has decided a different approach is need to achieve its goals. What ever they might be I very much doubt they have anything to do with Bill Gates concerns or wishes.
I think that China is coming to visit with its own agenda and unless the american leader, and George Bush, are very carefull they are going to be taken for a ride.
Why do I think so?
Well China has only got to look west (no not the US you idiot, russia is to china's west, the US is to the east) to see what choice it has.
The soviet union did what the US wanted and tried to become a western capatlist democracy and that worked out well didn't it?
So China got a clear choice, follow the western path of "democracy and capatalism" and follow the USSR into economic ruin and war OR continue on its own path wich so far has been making it a very large fortune and in ever tighter control off the western economies.
Any negiotator knows you need to check why the other party doesn't want to do what you want them to do. That is obvious. Yet a really smart negiotator knows that you should be even more wary of the other parties motivations of doing exactly what you want them to do.
If China clamps down on piracy and installs windows on every machine you can be very sure it is not because it makes Bill Gates happy.
I find it very hard to believe that China would willingly hand over its entire IT future to an american company. The only possible reason I can see is that MS software could be more easily used to spy on its citizens (open source linux makes this far harder)
Mmm, perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Chinese and American intrest are the same after all.
Neither did it create a truly new product kinescope already existed and provided a pretty similar function. Just slower.
So what this really proves is that most tech is based on other tech and that devices wich the average human considers revolutionary are in fact evolutionary.
Funny that even after reading an article that constantly mentions how the various parts of the video recorder existed before you still claim to be innovative.
It is, but because they got existing tech to work better and together.
Granted some japanese porn still has closeups wich results in one big censored screen but it is offset by the absolutly weird stuff the companies like Soft in Demand come up with.
For instance their Deep Kiss series is totally hot yet has no censorship. Because it doesn't have any nudity. Thats right. Porn with no nudity. ONLY in Japan!
On a more serious note. A lot of japanese porn seems to obsess with rape. Offcourse the only way I know about it is because westerners share it via torrents so it is hardly limited to the west BUT I can imagine that someone in japan is worried about it.
In the game section too there are plenty of rape games. Games the make GTA seem very tame indeed.
The problem is that even if these violent games do have an effect on people what are you going to do? Plenty of stuff affects people badly. Religion is one. Just check all the holy wars we have and been having. Lots of people get in trouble because of alcohol as well.
Yet do we ban religion or booze? No.
We accept the price of some people being unable to deal with it as worth paying so the majority can maintain their freedom.
Then again alcohol is moderated and the church (at least in the west) is kept on a tight leash. Perhaps it is time to accept that games should be controlled as well. You know with like an age limit system so violent/sexual games can only be legally bought by people of the right age.
Oh that already exists?
Part of me is horrified by the notion of restricting free speech. Just replace "game" with "book" and most people would be very upset if you started banning fiction based on content.
On the other hand, what kind of person plays a rape sim anyway? Well me offcourse, else how would I know about them, but only once and then I just stayed the fuck away. Still I am not likely to rape in real life (oh okay since I am a nerd even a teenage girl could beat me up) even after playing.
In europe the driving license laws are being upgraded to be the same across the EU. One of the changes is that now all the countries will have a limit as to what class of motorcycle you can drive depending on your age (and a bit on how much experience you got).
It is in reaction to the "problem" of young people getting on powerfull bikes and killing themselves.
Strangely it is not much of a problem. First of all the accidents are rare since powerfull bikes are very very expensive and very hard to drive when drunk (you fall over wich is embarrising but rarely lethal).
The accidents that do happen are solo. Meaning the idiot eh sorry young biker kills himself and noone else. So who gives a hit. Evolution in action.
Yet to curb this limited problem personal freedom is sacrificed. Yet powerfull cars are not limited. Yet these do cause far more deaths often NOT of the young driver causing the accident.
Strange eh. Cars driving by the majority are unregulated, motor cycles NOT being driving by the majority are regulated.
Games make people violent. This is a fact.
Soccer matches make lots more people violent. So violent city centers have to be closed off by the police as soccer fans rampage through the streets.
Games played by a "minority" are regulated. Soccer watched by a majority is not.
I am getting a HUGE flash of insight here. Could it be that politcians are only intrested in regulating/banning stuff that is NOT seen to be enjoyed by a majority?
Perhaps not, it is too simple BUT I do think that going after games is too easy an answer. Not that I got an answer. Live is a bitch.
That is not what I did. I bought bulk from out of the way places then distributed them to key spot and sold them in small portions.
So I provided two services. I helped people avoid having to buy 20 of something wich they could not afford. AND I put it in locations they were at.
In real life that is what a distributor does. Or perhaps the term is wholesaler. A supermarket chain buys potatoes by the ton from a remote farmer then sells them in handy 5 kilo packages at a shop near your home.
In return he ads a small percentage. In my case 10-20%. Those who didn't want it could always go to the farmer/chef themselves and cough up the credits for a crate of 20 units themselves as well as take the 20 minute round trip.
So I think it is a little different what I did from what you describe. I admit I got a handfull of emails crying foul but far more positive feedback from people who appreciated not having to do their own shopping. Same as most people like their supermarket despite the fact that 30 minute trip will get you potatoes at half the price.
Is the fact that these "kids" play GTA because they are already inclined to activities that are illegal in their legal system OR does the game make them inclined?
Simply put, do violent games make people aggresive OR do aggresive people play violent games.
The problem is that "violent game" is such a vague term. Almost all games are violent but 99% of the time you are the good guy fighting the legions of evil.
GTA San Andreas has you drowning a rapper and his girlfriend because your mate didn't get his rap accepted.
What is worse, I even seen a GTA fan applaud the game for giving you a more clearcut hero. Right, massmurder because some untalented prick is upset about being rejected is a rolemodel.
If you then tell me that violent nutters play GTA and GTA makes violent nutters I can see how you could reach that conclusion.
Most people probably play the game the same way as they watch a over the top hong kong violent movie. They know it is totally fake mindless entertainment with no basis in real life.
Then again there are always a few who can't seperate real life from fiction. Who think that what happens in movies, books and games is real or at least a rolemodel for real life.
Take the movie "fight club". Some see it as a fun movie, some see it as the best of movies but some see it as a good idea.
But is it the movie that made them that way OR is it just an outlet?
Frankly I don't know. The "easiest" and favored by slashdot is that it is unrelated. I think at minimum you could diagnose a violent person by the amount of violent media they consume.
The media loves to claim the other extreme that violent games make a non-violent person violent.
The truth may be the horrible notion that violent games or movies or books are the catalyst for violent behaviour. Not so much creating violent people but setting them off. Pushing them just over the edge.
But what can we do? We can offcourse ban violent products but where do you draw the line? You can bet that the moment you agree a line must be drawn you will then be constantly fighting a battle over where to draw it with constant pressure to ban more and more.
Perhaps what is needed is the far more difficult answer. That we accept that some people just don't "fit" and either need to be removed from this world (death/lockup) OR be "cured" to "fit".
I am currently doing work wich takes me out on the streets a lot and into contact with people at their houses. There are a lot of nutters about. People unable to cope with the world as it is. Some turn in on themselves and eventually are discovered as a rotting corpse in tons of filth (and I mean tons, metric) OR they turn violent and sooner or later are arrested, locked up for a short time and then released again only to get worse.
The last couple of decades the western world by and large has been scrimping and saving on social care while the pressures of living in the west have only increased. From my current work I really get the idea that things have been pushed to far and that we are sitting on a timebomb of mentally unstable people who just can't cope with live.
Does a mentally unstable person unable to control his temper living in a society unwilling to correct him with a firm hand REALLY need to play a video game that glorifies uncontrolled meaningless violence?
No the game did not make that person that way. We did. But you can't tell me that a game like GTA is helping.
Offcourse if you accept what I say as true then there is a problem. The solution is gonna cost lots of money (tax payers money) and doesn't have a handy scapegoat (well the taxpayer who preffered to get meaningless taxcutts over providing aid to mentally unstable people).
Far easier just to cry "GTA makes killers" and for the gamers to cry "no it doesn't". No massive social aid needed to get unstable people readjusted. Just good headlines that sell ads while the timebomb i
Not level grinding games like WoW or Everquest.
An MMORPG is not like a single player RPG. You will never be the farm boy/girl who saves the kingdom and marries the princess. You can't be the hero in an epic story that changes the fate of an entire continent.
An MMORPG is instead about living a live in an alternate universe.
Those who complain that some people are using Second Live to escape their real live are idiots.
Because of cause that is why people play games especially computer games. You don't think Michael Schumacher plays F1 games do you? WW2 veterans do not play Medal of Honor (or if they do find it boring and unrealistic to the extreme) and so on. People with exciting lives do not watch TV and do not play games. That is something for the rest of us to do. TV/Computers games, the opium of the masses.
An MMORPG is a second live for escaping your normal live. How deep and in what way depends on the person. To some just "levelling" up, raiding dungeons and looting stuff is all they want.
Others want more but it is a rare game that gives them the possibilty.
I played Star Wars Galaxies (Before combat upgrade made me leave) and later Everquest 2 (anyone feeling the need to recommend other MMORPG's please check wether they can be paid without a credit card first) and after that Guild Wars.
The last two don't hold a candle in respects to "role" playing.
I probably don't mean the same thing with roleplaying as most people. I am not talking about those people that roleplay a scout or a wizard in Everquest. Or those that roleplay rebel scum or a imperial scriptkiddie. (Oh be honest, have you ever met a mature imperial?)
No, I mean those who went beyond the title of their character sheet and roleplayed a trader or a explorer or a outfitter.
I played a trader, I liked exploring the planets and this often led me to unvisited shops wich usually had some stock going unsold. Easy to buy it and then resell it at hotspots for a slight margin. Food and drinks (buffs in swg) were espcially good. Few players had the dedication to prepare by stocking up before a mission so typical SWG fare was.
Player1: "All ready to go to the most lethal planet in the galaxy to go hunt the most lethal critter known?"
Player2: "Yeah yeah yeah lets go already enough time delaying"
Player1: "Okay we arrived, lets move out to the first lair"
Player2: "Give me some brandy I ran out"
Player1 + 3-9: "we are all on our last bottle too"
Cue my little character stocking the bazaars at the out of the way destinations with quality, pricey but quality brandy. Oh and in 1 bottle portions so as not to overtax those who spend all their money on a overpriced weapon.
It was in a way a lot of fun. Others I knew got a kick out of constantly checking what resources were being dropped. One guy seemed to be very good at finding players for missions. If you were missing a doc or a bio engineer etc for a raid, he could find someone willing to join.
In short the game allowed you to play more then just the "hero" prototypes.
If you ever wonder why SWG fans bemoan the New Game Experience it is because they removed the freedoms to play those other characters.
SWG was a girl heavy game with a lot of them having a sideline in dressmaking. I was better dressed in game then in real life.
So to me, hookers and pimps and johns in a MMO game doesn't sound bad at all. Not because of the sex but because these people found a way to play the game wich goes beyond what is in the manual.
Anyway it is nothing new. The sims online had an article about an underaged hooker.
A good MMORPG will be more then just grinding levels and raiding dungeons. Not that there is anything wrong with that but DDO to be fair can be seen as nothing mo
Only kidding of course, well partially. How many botnets consist of linux or OS-X machines?
It does however show just how hopeless windows security is. Even criminals have costs so if they can make a profit after paying their hosting and electricity and hardware and man power with just 25 dollar per 10 thousand machines then the cost and labour of infecting a windows machine must truly be trivial.
Lets face it the mafia doesn't do it for penny profits. They are not supermarkets surviving on a 1 cent per sale profit. They want millions and they want them now.
How many times $25 does it take to intrest a mobster?
Frankly I don't think the problem is going to go away. The idea that MS is ever going to provide a secure OS is laughable and even if they did nothing helps against a dimwitted user who happily installs anything if it promises a nudie picture.
They only two easy solutions I see is to install a serious watchdog on the net. One who can kick off ISP's that host the mob AND users who let their PC's get infected.
Would that be workable? Even "respectable" western ISP's barely respond to complaints about attacks. We got a spam watchdog that already kicks of ISP off the email net when they misbehave and this just barely works. If the same was applied officially to the net as a whole entire parts of the world would be disconnected.
Perhaps it is just something we got to live with. The real live mafia never went away. Why should the net be any different. As long as their is money to made people will attempt to get it.
But even worse is how the hell am I going to get even semi uptodate news? The service don't know what I am going to want to read so I have to download ALL the news before I go offline ONLY to then have only old news on my system.
Sure there are times when I wish I could visit a site without a net connection. Most notably a help site that tells me how to get my connection back.
But for the rest? You would be lugging around a shitload of data in the hope that one day you need to search something while offline and then hope that it is in the cache AND that it is still relevant.
It reminds me off those old programs we in europe had in the days of modems. Since we had to pay per minute connected it often made sense to download all your favorite pages as fast as possible and then read them offline. I for instance had it setup to get the various webcomics and such in one go so I only paid for a few minutes what would have cost me at least half an hour online.
I can still see the same for modern times. When you arrive at an hotspot your computer quickly downloads the pages you regurarly visit and gets the data so you can read them later when you might have left the hotspot.
But downloading ALL the web? No, to much data that to be transferred that you will never use anyway.
I can see how they arrived at the idea but I think that they should have stopped before they arrived at the point they decided to cache the web. Develop a program that can easily download the pages you are very likely to want to read when the laptop happens to be connected for off line reading and leave it at that.
Then again, that might not get you VC money.
So default kernels are bloated.
However the moment you compile your own OR can fine tune a distro to one specific set of hardware you can cut a lot of crap out.
Take the simplest of things. Module support. Only needed if you load modules and modules are only really needed by developers OR if you want to include all the modules for say all the soundcards and load the right one at boot.
If you know wich modules you need you can just compile them in and skip all the module support.
Same with a lot of things.
A fine tuned kernel is a lot smaller.
The proof? Linux runs on tiny computers like switches and watches and phones and pda's.
Linux the source code is big and feature rich.
Linux the kernel is as fat or as slim as you want it to be.
You can't make out with your sister okay? Just learn to accept that 2nd cousin is the closest you can legally get in the US of A.
Ghandi's "war" wasn't exactly bloodless either. For many of his people it ended with "then they fight you" but for india as a whole it became "and then you win".
It is the reason why people standing up to fight for something are so rare. Because it is so bloody likely that you will be standing all alone when it comes to "then they fight you".
Many westerners are now bitterly complaining about their goverments becoming more like dictatorships. However to take up arms against them means that you better have a lot of people doing the same thing at the same time or instead of a brave freedom fighter of the revolution your just a lone nutcase with a gun.
Amazingly public transport companies park their vehicles outside the city as well. Not many bus depots in the city centers.
Oh and taxi's also serve a similar function. I believe they paint them yellow over there instead of the normal black that civilized people use.
While your idea sounds nice it has just one small drawback. If you equip every car with it you have just doubled the traffic in and out of the city center. Your car driving you to your work and then driving itself out to a parking lot. The last thing busy cities need is more traffic.
Oh and an other version of truly "self parking" cars? Getting a ride with a co-worker. Drops me off in front of the office. All it costs is to make two cups of coffee.
Yet I still use the same PC that I played Morrowind on to play Oblivion.
Anyway they charge for the PC addons as well.
The problem I see with the addons is that you really have to question value for money. Considering how much content there is in the game (2 dozen armour sets alone) can you really justify 1/25th of the total game price for just an extra set of armour?
There is an old economic lesson that teaches you that you should not try to squeeze every dime from a customer. If you do, they will get upset and sooner or later, if they get the chance, rebell.
Take the european fixed line monopolies. They charged for everything INCLUDING stuff that used to be free (directory enquiries used to be 100% free, then only free from phoneboots now it costs a couple of euro for a single lookup).
They used to get away with it. Until internet telephones came along and now KPN (dutch monopolist) is starting to really feel the hurt as multiple competitors have emerged that simply state in their ads "we allow you to get rid of KPN forever". It sells like hotcakes.
With games it is even easier. I bought oblivion in the shop. I do not got a credit card (it is a european thing, americans do not even bother to try to understand, you can't) and I want that mod. Gee, what to do, what to do.
Oh I now. Download it from a torrent. Betheseda, I bought every elder scroll game, this one is that last. Next one to enter my home will do so over the internet gratis.
It is a form of evolution I suppose. There are two kinds of people. Those that go and see what makes that growling sound in the back of the cave and those that spend the night in a tree and have kids.
So now the new x-box has live and all of a sudden it is gonna make a huge difference? Why?
Frankly it is only in the intrest of the console makers and game makers that a single console wins.
For the consumers if one company would really win it would mean the end of choice. Do we really want Sony OR MS OR Nintendo to achieve the same kind of absolute control over console gaming that MS has over PC gaming?
So by then we will have seen the fading out of of 256mb machines and gone to 512mb. (Even the cheapest Dell now has that already) Wich is happily the recommended minimum. In fact many Dells already come with 1 gig as do a lot of "cheapo" white brand PC's.
As for CPU. Well thanks to the move to Dual core's in 1 year I think single core machines will be rare. Why go single when a dual costs only 10 bucks extra?
The only real problem may be with the 3D card needed for the new gui. Except that I have been led to believe that it is optional and you can still use the old gui wich does not require a 3D card.
So basically, any halfway decent machine will do but as always you need lots of ram.
So what else is new? This has been true for opensource as well. You are not going to run KDE with all the options on a 486 with 16mb memory.
What I want is a sticker that says wether the hardware is DRM ready. That is the thing I am intrested in for Windows Vista.
Not in the way MS/Intel/etc wants. Just so I know wich products to avoid like the plague.
A nice shiny sticker "Big Brother Ready" so we can let them rot on the shops shelves.
That should be vaporware capable.
Oh and it looks scrumptous with the "new" budget card. Just not supersmooth. But good enough for my budget.
As for this whole ATM idea that becomes a small store. Well, surely paying your bills through it is only for the poor (else you would just let your bank do it for free) who can only pay with cash. 1.75-3 dollars seems like the extra banks charge here if you want to pay a bill cash as the counter instead of through the mail from your account.
As for other services. Yeah great. Internet access through an ATM? Talk about a waste of hardware. You got a small bank vault, a complex teller machine sitting idle while somebody is browing goatse and 20 fuming customers behind him waiting to withdraw cash?
Couple that with the fact that an awfull lot of people are already confused enough by regular cash dispensers and this sounds like a really bad idea.
Then again what do I know. Maybe people said the same things about the original ATM's.
But 3 dollars for paying a bill. Yikes.