I remember being fairly upset at the time myself (must've been like 10 or so).
Looking back on the ERA, I think it's non-passage was a good thing. Considering what is being done in the name of equality on a national level, I can imagine the outlawing of urinals and women in frontline combat. Maybe having a few gender-based differences isn't all that bad, after all.
Makes sense, the penalty lessens my concern about people using it as a path to wreck the game for others.
I don't see it as a panacea for the problem - I wanted something like this for D2 so I didn't have to spend half my life developing skills for my character.
After some thought, I suspect that even with something like this, the addicts will still run the show - having the better items, higher skills, higher levels.
Sorry if i'm irritating you - the discussion is intriguing and I have some firm views about gaming developed over time.
Removing simplistic relative comparisons of strength between characters seems to harm the game.
I've tried it - others have tried it - it doesn't seem to work as well with mudders as it does with paper and pencil RPG players. For a good pissing match, you need a level identifier, I guess.
Incidentally, every MUD i've worked on has used numerical skills not tied to level, though we generally enforce a sanity check on skill numbers, keeping them +-25% from the 'average' for that level, because of the pkillers once again.
I understood the premise you were offering. I am speaking from the perspective of the mud administrator. Let me describe a scenario to explain what I mean:
Normal character progression is as follows:
Create new character (Level 1, little skill)
Progress quickly at first, then slowly (exponential rise in time required as levels increase)
Achieve maximum (or near-maximum)level, then participate in playerkilling (PK) or guild activities
Note that with your solution, we jump right to 3. Everyone is going to do that - it's easier. Particularly with a free mud, your only weapon against people who are harming the social strata of the mud is character elimination, and hence loss of all the time invested. If there is no time invested, you have no stick to beat them with. The social environment dissolves under the stress of assholes run amok.
The killer types would make such an environment a travesty. Your weapon against killers is loss of character, loss of level. If it is easily obtainable, eveyone will take that option. You've just created a new, level playing field for the kind of people who like to torture others.
Admittedly, every environment needs a few 'killer' types. Still, it is the task of the administrator to keep them in check.
I agree, and I disagree. Yes, sometimes. That was my point that you are 'at the mercy of the authors'. The nice thing about private authors is that there is often an institutional nature to the MUD. Therefore, someone will take the mud over and run it, often, if it is popular enough.
Every author gets burned out. You have to wonder what will happen when a commercial entity gets burned out on writing a mud though. Seems like EQ is going through that trial now.
...all have this in common. You are at the mercy of whomever develops it. MMORPGs run by large commercial outfits are particularly able to lose sight of the target, which is player satisfaction.
Still, one cannot blame Sony entirely. Players have unreasonable expectations based upon their unique point of view. They want a 'fun' game. The makers of the game are concerned about bottom line, and game balance, in that order.
I run a free mud so i have a bit of perspective on this. I used to play muds, but it's like crack. So I just code lightly for those who are still addicted and try to run a sort of 'halfway house'.
I had a feeling after Y2K that things would never go back to what they were.
Commoditization of IT is why much of this happened. I unfortunately was a willing participant - switching dozens of Banyan/Novell/OS/2 Lan server infrastructures over to M$ products.
This very standardization is what provided the opening for companies to export development (and now engineering) jobs overseas. Once you export those jobs, they never come back. People complain about H1-Bs but the real issue is the sweatshops in Bangalore and elsewhere in India/Pakistan. You simply cannot compete with these people. You could pay 10 programmers for your salary. Sure, they suck, but with 10, eventually they get it right.
The whole programming side of the house is in for a 15 year recession as is hardware engineering. About the only place in IT that is reasonably stable is infrastructure and desktop support, and even that is under siege by hordes of paper certificate morons.
All this due to standardization. Resist it with all your might (for all the good it will do). I ponder if we had acted differently in the timespan 95-'00 whether things would be different now, or whether this was a natural evolution.
Either way, find a niche and cultivate it, or change professions. I'm not sure even championing open source will help.
If I left the gun out for the child to use, I deserve to get shot. Nanny government doesn't need to mandate that. The desire for utter security in life is childish. When (if) we grow up, we realize that. Problem with most lefties is that they never grow up.
If telling the truth is rebellious in your world, Comrade, I feel sorry for you.
The home of Torricelli, Harrison Williams - nay, the very bastion of corruption in government provides us with more stunning legislation sure to cure the nation's ills.
After all, criminals will be sure to get 'smart' guns. Ditto for inner city residents looking for personal protection. Right? I mean they can't speak english - resist it, even, but they'll get a smart gun. For sure.
More crap that sounds plausible but is really utterly useless. Cheers, Trenton!
Anyone got any ideas for where to move? 33 years of NJ bullshit is enough for any one person.
People such as Karl Rove are canny enough to see that this policy is guaranteed to turn people like me, workaday folk, into activists. They don't want to alienate this segment of the population before '04. And after that, they have bigger fish to fry. Affirmative action, school choice, etc.
No, this is a nonstarter. I applaud your battle against it but I don't see this ever coming to fruition.
Remember that this hodgepodge of draconian policies was manufactured by the remnant of Reagan's Cold Warrior team. Those folks were on the verge of loony, even if they didn't officially tip over into that segment. They're paranoid and barely understand the technology in question here. They ask what is possible from a technical standpoint and some geek advising them tells them that central surveillance of US internet traffic is 'technically possible'. So now that's policy.
They got their jobs due to political favors - they aren't in control of this White House. To their everlasting regret, of course.
Bush will swoop in and save us from all of this for brownie points at the appropriate moment, like right before Labor Day 2004 or some other politically suitable time.
Of course, I could be wrong, but Rove hasn't been an idiot much yet, has he? Rather, he has been downright machiavellian, as I see it.
(fyi: I work for the government - so I am daily amazed at the institutional ennui there. Maybe that results in my having very little fear of gathered information in the hands of those clowns. I don't think this one will have time to take root and be effective before it is destroyed. Poindexter is on the ropes already, the way I see it. Someone remembered about Iran-Contra finally...)
It seems this company just never can let things get too good for them. At some point, they screw up everything, and i'm not talking recently, but historically, back even to the early 80's with the massive marketing blunders with the Apple II series.
Why did they even make Darwin open-source? I note M$ uses BSD TCP/IP code and that sure isn't open source. This seems like just bad publicity that they don't need. And what did it buy them, ever?
Why not use the BSD license for the small number of basic components that are APSL? I mean, who gives a crap - not like they are handing out the Finder or something.
Why not just use NeXT code rather than BSD? They had a full Unix behind them. Why mess with open source at all?
If you are going to choose an open-source Un*x, why not choose the most popular one (Linux)? Then you build in gobs of application support.
They have a wonderful customer base, who will stick to them through thick and thin. They have decent technology at times. Yet, for all this, at the times of their greatest success, they seem to have this weird hubris that causes them to make idiotic business decisions that poison the very landslide of acceptance they seemingly deserve. Forever a niche player.
This is just a tiny example of same. I feel sorry for people who are enamoured of Apple. I really do. Kind of like being a Red Sox fan or something.
It isn't a stupid postulation to be sure that they AREN'T going to investigate fully every incident. Who has the time or the manpower to do that? So, now they are taking on the responsibility of policing every software vendor. I wish them luck.
I don't trust them to do the job. This is another case of sweeping it under the rug and capitulating to corporate interests, which do not agree with my interests, or most of the other people here, I suspect.
I suppose if i'm an idiot, it's only fair to mention you're a naive moron to believe that crap.
Did it occur to the powers at ISS that this rule basically just enlarges the window for exploits to be exploited? The real danger zone is the time between the discovery (not necessarily the disclosure!) of the vulnerability, and the point when a certain critical mass of vulnerable boxes are patched.
How many people patch their systems the day the patch is released? Certainly, I do, but does even the majority do so? I doubt it. Moreover, they're giving 30 days for the script kiddies to run amok while we are clueless. They will certainly find out, if there is even an inkling of information about the exploit. IRC is much more effective than ISS anyway.
Nice to know that black hats will always have better information than us. Thanks ISS. Another step backward in the fight to preserve our systems.
After reading many such tales of class-action lawsuits, I can predict the results:
The plaintiff's theory will probably fly, though the actual damages will be significantly less.
It'll take years to litigate.
One third of the damages will go to the lawyers, as usual.
The remainder will be distributed in penny packets to the plaintiffs.
Bonzi's rank and file employees will be jobless.
The owners of Bonzi will get off scot free, as the corporation will take the hit, not them, individually.
So, in essence:
The employees lose out on a job, and income.
The lawyers make out like bandits.
The parties damaged get inconsequential renumeration.
The principals of Bonzi laugh all the way to the bank.
Note i'm not suggesting the employees are blameless here, but they are regular people, i'm sure, who just go to work every day.
Somehow, this doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent to setting up a spamhaus. What's to stop them from setting up another deceptive spam outfit using the capital from this firm? They made out, after all.
A good way to make civil penalties hurt those responsible is what is needed. Perhaps limit the protection that corporations provide their officers/stockholders? Let civil penalties for corporations translate into incarceration for those responsible for such damages? Seems harsh, almost un-American, but where is the solution otherwise?
I don't know if you've ever seen Seurat's work, but it is LARGE (canvas-wise) and absolutely stunning visually. I got up close to the canvas at MOMA in NYC and said "He's dithering!" and my girlfriend, the BACS going for her art degree now, craps all over me "No, it's pointillism!".
I dropped the argument due to my desire to make sweet love to her all night long.
Sorry, you're wrong. At least by any definition of liability I was ever exposed to during my years of settling claims (not all that different than what we have here).
The owner of a car is not liable for the negligent actions of a driver of the same vehicle. You'd have to construct some type of theory as to why the owner is somehow liable - poor selection of driver, unsafe conditions, whatever. The point is that this isn't cut and dried and you can't make that assumption that because someone owned the vehicle/computer/whatever that they have engaged in some sort of tort. You need to demonstrate that via evidence, which may be a large barrier against lawsuits. For example, 'my minor child did this' would be one very effective (and probably true) explanation. Just try extracting the cash from a typical family under those circumstances. Isn't happening.
This is a flawed strategy unless Denmark is a lot different than the US in public reaction. Where are they going with this? Scaring people? Isn't going to work. Not really - the targets that might be scared of this are probably not trading files anyway.
Why do all the "Ask Slashdot" questions tend to be about things like legal advice or someone's homework, which we tend to know nothing about or are totally disinterested in (respectively)?
I would rather see some geek questions that we'd have a shot at answering conclusively.
I am amazed no one has mentioned the issues of addiction and the strong negative aspects of bringing the mud/mush/moo/whatever paradigm to an easily accessible graphical game targeted at women, apparently. Perhaps I should explain.
My background - I spent 9 months as a player and the last five years coding for muds, particularly MudOS LP-like muds. Object oriented, as the previous poster referred to. You can whip up a new object anytime you feel like it. Written in a nice language called LPC which is kinda like Objective-C. P-code compilation and execution, with inheritance and polymorphism. But i'm digressing.
Our usage numbers were always in the high 100s on an average weeknight, 240 I believe was the max simultaneous usage. Not inconsequential considering the cpu load of interpreting all that pcode every time someone walked from one room to another. There were about 10k user accounts at any one time (we did/do regular idle purges)
The primary usage was male, college age. The average user would be freshman college, about 18-19. Things were not evenly spread out however. A very tiny minority of the users were above the age of 40, less than 1%. Males over 30 were the rarest. The numbers of late 20's aged male and female players were trending downward from the college peak. But there were a huge load of 30's women. The bulk of the females were in the 30-40 bracket, very rarely above it.
I thought this a very strange thing and didn't really believe it till I met a few of the online acquaintances to know for sure that they were really middle aged women. Universally they are married but near divorce, or single without much hope of hooking up with someone. A lot of them do a lot of sex talk with the younger college age boys online.
(we call it 'mudnasty', doing a 'what' command and seeing what these people say to each other would make you retch)
Some of these misguided people actually hook up in real life with ~20 year age separations - they never work out, but they persist in this fantasy until proven that it won't work.
As an administrator I feel some kind of responsibility to counsel people who are obviously lost or addicted - "mud addiction" is a huge issue, people spending every waking hour on these things - if you went to college in the last 10 years you will know what I mean. People lose sight of life when immersed in these worlds and just let everything fall apart around them. So I counsel someone who is badly astray and try to help. Sometimes I ban them if the situation is bad enough.
I remember one particular case out of dozens over the years - this was a 38 yr old woman from Sacramento CA who was in love with some 20 yr old guy from around Norfolk, VA. She persisted doing the 'mudnasty' thing repeatedly with this guy, resorting to phone sex to get him off, all while she was married and living in the same house with (and sleeping in the same bed with) her husband of 19 years. The boy from VA was virile and talked nicely to her. He was irresistible to her.
I had a talk with her, and went to visit her on a trip to CA and met her husband too. They were nice enough people but the house was a pig sty, cobwebs on the ceiling, dirty dishes stacked to the ceiling, and an obese woman who would otherwise be pretty sharp looking sitting in front of a computer console banging out love (sex) messages to some guy who was young enough to be her son - easily. All the classic signs of depression were obvious in her.
I tried to get her to do something about her marriage - turns out that she was unhappy with her husband, he made her feel devalued, not pretty, not like a woman 'should' according to her. He also yelled at her a lot. Given her behaviors, I can hardly blame the guy for being upset though. While their marriage didn't work out, she got her ass off the mud, terminated her relationship with the guy from VA and started the divorce proceedings after I spent about 6 months off and on working on her to 'take positive steps to clean up your life'. One small victory, sort of, though I suspect that if she'd not been so jaded by her online existence, her husband might not have needed to be replaced. They had had a good relationship at one time, I believe.
She wasn't an isolated case. You will find a lot of women like her across America, they are the consumers of the Xanax and the Prozac, the depressed masses, with a bit too much weight and too little self-esteem. I was married to a woman like that myself.
One of the nice things about text muds is that they have a high barrier to entry - you have to use telnet, and the commands are kind of arcane - you won't find most women interested in it.
What about "The Sims Online Edition"? Seems like that is the target audience, middle aged women with a lot of time on their hands, and issues with the relative worth of their real lives. It's an addictive escape. Will we be generating hundreds of thousands of divorces, as depicted by the woman above? How many will sink ever deeper into depression as a result of the total lack of real social interaction as a result of spending multudinous hours pursuing the Sim life?
I think the simple accessibility of this kind of addictive 'crack' is an inherently bad thing. I wouldn't ban it, but I would wish that people were more conscious of the life-destroying dangers they face by total immersion in such games.
Mind you, I refer to women in this case almost exclusively because that is the target audience for "The Sims". However, if you want to discuss the failings of men in a multiplayer game environment, i'll be glad to oblige. They have easily as many flaws. Also note that the women who play text muds are a specific group that does not reflect the population at large. So women out there, don't take offense. This isn't necessarily you. It's just a type of person that finds it easy to immerse in online games.
My apologies if I offended anyone, this was no troll.
Something else for the lefty environmental lobby to whine about. What's new? They'll only be happy when we are all living in thatched huts made of biodegradable straw and eating a true vegan diet.
Or dead. I know one such individual who advocates reducing the global carrying capacity to 250 million. i.e. killing off about 5.75 billion of us. In the name of superior environment.
My ancestors mined coal, worked in steel mills, were cops (exposure to lead!) - these things are not optimal careers if you want to live a long time. Neither is computer recycling, at least the way the Chinese do. When they get their act together, i'm sure they'll think up a way to do it in a far less harmful fashion, as we would do it in the US. When they do so, their environment will reap the benefits. Until then, they are masters of their own destiny.
I couldn't care less. Greenpeace and the rest can go get stuffed.
Stress that the kowtowing to corporate interests is causing unfair reprecussions for the fine cadets at the USNA. The characterization of the offense as 'theft' is an outright lie. In time of war, how can we tolerate this kind of crass commercialism denigrating the contributions of the US Navy?
Use snail mail, they won't pay attention to an email. Don't let the RIAA have this kind of victory. The service academies are tough enough without this shit.
...at least any current nuclear weapon, it would seem.
The problem with nukes in space is that chemical explosive blocks are used to create the pressure required for the fission chain reaction, whether U235 or Pu. This is the spark plug for the fusion reaction that any large weapon (> 100kt) would need. You'd have to design a system that created those same conditions without using a chemical explosive, or alternatively provide a pressurized compartment where an atmosphere would exist capable of sustaining the explosion.
Then again, I am not a physicist (IANAP?) so maybe someone smarter than me can comment on this seeming problem.
Too many morons with mod points at this place. As if pointing out the obvious, that governments don't give a rat's ass about pollution of open source projects with trojan code. Since it's become obvious that the open source community cannot keep its code safe from such attacks, it's something to worry about.
Something -- code vaults, stronger verification checks of code -- whatever, has to be done about it now, or we're going to have to remove all open source stuff from anyone who cares about their systems, meaning government and business.
Knee-jerk support for Open Source is as pathetic as the same for Microsoft. This is a hole you could drive a truck through and a lack of exercise of fiduciary responsibility due to open source zealotry is as bad as what the bastards at Enron did. Fix this, or the open source stuff is coming out of my company, and anywhere I work.
You assholes with mod points aren't going to make this problem go away. It'll be your undoing. I can hear the M$ sales pitch right now...
Slashdot Mirror
I remember being fairly upset at the time myself (must've been like 10 or so).
Looking back on the ERA, I think it's non-passage was a good thing. Considering what is being done in the name of equality on a national level, I can imagine the outlawing of urinals and women in frontline combat. Maybe having a few gender-based differences isn't all that bad, after all.
Makes sense, the penalty lessens my concern about people using it as a path to wreck the game for others.
I don't see it as a panacea for the problem - I wanted something like this for D2 so I didn't have to spend half my life developing skills for my character.
After some thought, I suspect that even with something like this, the addicts will still run the show - having the better items, higher skills, higher levels.
Sorry if i'm irritating you - the discussion is intriguing and I have some firm views about gaming developed over time.
Removing simplistic relative comparisons of strength between characters seems to harm the game.
I've tried it - others have tried it - it doesn't seem to work as well with mudders as it does with paper and pencil RPG players. For a good pissing match, you need a level identifier, I guess.
Incidentally, every MUD i've worked on has used numerical skills not tied to level, though we generally enforce a sanity check on skill numbers, keeping them +-25% from the 'average' for that level, because of the pkillers once again.
I understood the premise you were offering. I am speaking from the perspective of the mud administrator. Let me describe a scenario to explain what I mean:
Normal character progression is as follows:
Note that with your solution, we jump right to 3. Everyone is going to do that - it's easier. Particularly with a free mud, your only weapon against people who are harming the social strata of the mud is character elimination, and hence loss of all the time invested. If there is no time invested, you have no stick to beat them with. The social environment dissolves under the stress of assholes run amok.
The killer types would make such an environment a travesty. Your weapon against killers is loss of character, loss of level. If it is easily obtainable, eveyone will take that option. You've just created a new, level playing field for the kind of people who like to torture others.
Admittedly, every environment needs a few 'killer' types. Still, it is the task of the administrator to keep them in check.
For reference...Bartle
I agree, and I disagree. Yes, sometimes. That was my point that you are 'at the mercy of the authors'. The nice thing about private authors is that there is often an institutional nature to the MUD. Therefore, someone will take the mud over and run it, often, if it is popular enough.
Every author gets burned out. You have to wonder what will happen when a commercial entity gets burned out on writing a mud though. Seems like EQ is going through that trial now.
...all have this in common. You are at the mercy of whomever develops it. MMORPGs run by large commercial outfits are particularly able to lose sight of the target, which is player satisfaction.
Still, one cannot blame Sony entirely. Players have unreasonable expectations based upon their unique point of view. They want a 'fun' game. The makers of the game are concerned about bottom line, and game balance, in that order.
I run a free mud so i have a bit of perspective on this. I used to play muds, but it's like crack. So I just code lightly for those who are still addicted and try to run a sort of 'halfway house'.
I had a feeling after Y2K that things would never go back to what they were.
Commoditization of IT is why much of this happened. I unfortunately was a willing participant - switching dozens of Banyan/Novell/OS/2 Lan server infrastructures over to M$ products.
This very standardization is what provided the opening for companies to export development (and now engineering) jobs overseas. Once you export those jobs, they never come back. People complain about H1-Bs but the real issue is the sweatshops in Bangalore and elsewhere in India/Pakistan. You simply cannot compete with these people. You could pay 10 programmers for your salary. Sure, they suck, but with 10, eventually they get it right.
The whole programming side of the house is in for a 15 year recession as is hardware engineering. About the only place in IT that is reasonably stable is infrastructure and desktop support, and even that is under siege by hordes of paper certificate morons.
All this due to standardization. Resist it with all your might (for all the good it will do). I ponder if we had acted differently in the timespan 95-'00 whether things would be different now, or whether this was a natural evolution.
Either way, find a niche and cultivate it, or change professions. I'm not sure even championing open source will help.
If I left the gun out for the child to use, I deserve to get shot. Nanny government doesn't need to mandate that. The desire for utter security in life is childish. When (if) we grow up, we realize that. Problem with most lefties is that they never grow up.
If telling the truth is rebellious in your world, Comrade, I feel sorry for you.
The home of Torricelli, Harrison Williams - nay, the very bastion of corruption in government provides us with more stunning legislation sure to cure the nation's ills.
After all, criminals will be sure to get 'smart' guns. Ditto for inner city residents looking for personal protection. Right? I mean they can't speak english - resist it, even, but they'll get a smart gun. For sure.
More crap that sounds plausible but is really utterly useless. Cheers, Trenton!
Anyone got any ideas for where to move? 33 years of NJ bullshit is enough for any one person.
I disagree only in your prognosis of the future.
People such as Karl Rove are canny enough to see that this policy is guaranteed to turn people like me, workaday folk, into activists. They don't want to alienate this segment of the population before '04. And after that, they have bigger fish to fry. Affirmative action, school choice, etc.
No, this is a nonstarter. I applaud your battle against it but I don't see this ever coming to fruition.
Remember that this hodgepodge of draconian policies was manufactured by the remnant of Reagan's Cold Warrior team. Those folks were on the verge of loony, even if they didn't officially tip over into that segment. They're paranoid and barely understand the technology in question here. They ask what is possible from a technical standpoint and some geek advising them tells them that central surveillance of US internet traffic is 'technically possible'. So now that's policy.
They got their jobs due to political favors - they aren't in control of this White House. To their everlasting regret, of course.
Bush will swoop in and save us from all of this for brownie points at the appropriate moment, like right before Labor Day 2004 or some other politically suitable time.
Of course, I could be wrong, but Rove hasn't been an idiot much yet, has he? Rather, he has been downright machiavellian, as I see it.
(fyi: I work for the government - so I am daily amazed at the institutional ennui there. Maybe that results in my having very little fear of gathered information in the hands of those clowns. I don't think this one will have time to take root and be effective before it is destroyed. Poindexter is on the ropes already, the way I see it. Someone remembered about Iran-Contra finally...)
It seems this company just never can let things get too good for them. At some point, they screw up everything, and i'm not talking recently, but historically, back even to the early 80's with the massive marketing blunders with the Apple II series.
Why did they even make Darwin open-source? I note M$ uses BSD TCP/IP code and that sure isn't open source. This seems like just bad publicity that they don't need. And what did it buy them, ever?
Why not use the BSD license for the small number of basic components that are APSL? I mean, who gives a crap - not like they are handing out the Finder or something.
Why not just use NeXT code rather than BSD? They had a full Unix behind them. Why mess with open source at all?
If you are going to choose an open-source Un*x, why not choose the most popular one (Linux)? Then you build in gobs of application support.
They have a wonderful customer base, who will stick to them through thick and thin. They have decent technology at times. Yet, for all this, at the times of their greatest success, they seem to have this weird hubris that causes them to make idiotic business decisions that poison the very landslide of acceptance they seemingly deserve.
Forever a niche player.
This is just a tiny example of same. I feel sorry for people who are enamoured of Apple. I really do. Kind of like being a Red Sox fan or something.
It isn't a stupid postulation to be sure that they AREN'T going to investigate fully every incident. Who has the time or the manpower to do that? So, now they are taking on the responsibility of policing every software vendor. I wish them luck.
I don't trust them to do the job. This is another case of sweeping it under the rug and capitulating to corporate interests, which do not agree with my interests, or most of the other people here, I suspect.
I suppose if i'm an idiot, it's only fair to mention you're a naive moron to believe that crap.
Did it occur to the powers at ISS that this rule basically just enlarges the window for exploits to be exploited? The real danger zone is the time between the discovery (not necessarily the disclosure!) of the vulnerability, and the point when a certain critical mass of vulnerable boxes are patched.
How many people patch their systems the day the patch is released? Certainly, I do, but does even the majority do so? I doubt it. Moreover, they're giving 30 days for the script kiddies to run amok while we are clueless. They will certainly find out, if there is even an inkling of information about the exploit. IRC is much more effective than ISS anyway.
Nice to know that black hats will always have better information than us. Thanks ISS. Another step backward in the fight to preserve our systems.
After reading many such tales of class-action lawsuits, I can predict the results:
So, in essence:
Note i'm not suggesting the employees are blameless here, but they are regular people, i'm sure, who just go to work every day.
Somehow, this doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent to setting up a spamhaus. What's to stop them from setting up another deceptive spam outfit using the capital from this firm? They made out, after all.
A good way to make civil penalties hurt those responsible is what is needed. Perhaps limit the protection that corporations provide their officers/stockholders? Let civil penalties for corporations translate into incarceration for those responsible for such damages? Seems harsh, almost un-American, but where is the solution otherwise?
Otherwise, the whole thing seems futile.
I don't know if you've ever seen Seurat's work, but it is LARGE (canvas-wise) and absolutely stunning visually. I got up close to the canvas at MOMA in NYC and said "He's dithering!" and my girlfriend, the BACS going for her art degree now, craps all over me "No, it's pointillism!".
I dropped the argument due to my desire to make sweet love to her all night long.
Sorry, you're wrong. At least by any definition of liability I was ever exposed to during my years of settling claims (not all that different than what we have here).
The owner of a car is not liable for the negligent actions of a driver of the same vehicle. You'd have to construct some type of theory as to why the owner is somehow liable - poor selection of driver, unsafe conditions, whatever. The point is that this isn't cut and dried and you can't make that assumption that because someone owned the vehicle/computer/whatever that they have engaged in some sort of tort. You need to demonstrate that via evidence, which may be a large barrier against lawsuits. For example, 'my minor child did this' would be one very effective (and probably true) explanation. Just try extracting the cash from a typical family under those circumstances. Isn't happening.
This is a flawed strategy unless Denmark is a lot different than the US in public reaction. Where are they going with this? Scaring people? Isn't going to work. Not really - the targets that might be scared of this are probably not trading files anyway.
Why do all the "Ask Slashdot" questions tend to be about things like legal advice or someone's homework, which we tend to know nothing about or are totally disinterested in (respectively)?
I would rather see some geek questions that we'd have a shot at answering conclusively.
I am amazed no one has mentioned the issues of addiction and the strong negative aspects of bringing the mud/mush/moo/whatever paradigm to an easily accessible graphical game targeted at women, apparently. Perhaps I should explain.
My background - I spent 9 months as a player and the last five years coding for muds, particularly MudOS LP-like muds. Object oriented, as the previous poster referred to. You can whip up a new object anytime you feel like it. Written in a nice language called LPC which is kinda like Objective-C. P-code compilation and execution, with inheritance and polymorphism. But i'm digressing.
Our usage numbers were always in the high 100s on an average weeknight, 240 I believe was the max simultaneous usage. Not inconsequential considering the cpu load of interpreting all that pcode every time someone walked from one room to another. There were about 10k user accounts at any one time (we did/do regular idle purges)
The primary usage was male, college age. The average user would be freshman college, about 18-19. Things were not evenly spread out however. A very tiny minority of the users were above the age of 40, less than 1%. Males over 30 were the rarest. The numbers of late 20's aged male and female players were trending downward from the college peak. But there were a huge load of 30's women. The bulk of the females were in the 30-40 bracket, very rarely above it.
I thought this a very strange thing and didn't really believe it till I met a few of the online acquaintances to know for sure that they were really middle aged women. Universally they are married but near divorce, or single without much hope of hooking up with someone. A lot of them do a lot of sex talk with the younger college age boys online.
(we call it 'mudnasty', doing a 'what' command and seeing what these people say to each other would make you retch)
Some of these misguided people actually hook up in real life with ~20 year age separations - they never work out, but they persist in this fantasy until proven that it won't work.
As an administrator I feel some kind of responsibility to counsel people who are obviously lost or addicted - "mud addiction" is a huge issue, people spending every waking hour on these things - if you went to college in the last 10 years you will know what I mean. People lose sight of life when immersed in these worlds and just let everything fall apart around them. So I counsel someone who is badly astray and try to help. Sometimes I ban them if the situation is bad enough.
I remember one particular case out of dozens over the years - this was a 38 yr old woman from Sacramento CA who was in love with some 20 yr old guy from around Norfolk, VA. She persisted doing the 'mudnasty' thing repeatedly with this guy, resorting to phone sex to get him off, all while she was married and living in the same house with (and sleeping in the same bed with) her husband of 19 years. The boy from VA was virile and talked nicely to her. He was irresistible to her.
I had a talk with her, and went to visit her on a trip to CA and met her husband too. They were nice enough people but the house was a pig sty, cobwebs on the ceiling, dirty dishes stacked to the ceiling, and an obese woman who would otherwise be pretty sharp looking sitting in front of a computer console banging out love (sex) messages to some guy who was young enough to be her son - easily. All the classic signs of depression were obvious in her.I tried to get her to do something about her marriage - turns out that she was unhappy with her husband, he made her feel devalued, not pretty, not like a woman 'should' according to her. He also yelled at her a lot. Given her behaviors, I can hardly blame the guy for being upset though. While their marriage didn't work out, she got her ass off the mud, terminated her relationship with the guy from VA and started the divorce proceedings after I spent about 6 months off and on working on her to 'take positive steps to clean up your life'. One small victory, sort of, though I suspect that if she'd not been so jaded by her online existence, her husband might not have needed to be replaced. They had had a good relationship at one time, I believe.
She wasn't an isolated case. You will find a lot of women like her across America, they are the consumers of the Xanax and the Prozac, the depressed masses, with a bit too much weight and too little self-esteem. I was married to a woman like that myself.
One of the nice things about text muds is that they have a high barrier to entry - you have to use telnet, and the commands are kind of arcane - you won't find most women interested in it.
What about "The Sims Online Edition"? Seems like that is the target audience, middle aged women with a lot of time on their hands, and issues with the relative worth of their real lives. It's an addictive escape. Will we be generating hundreds of thousands of divorces, as depicted by the woman above? How many will sink ever deeper into depression as a result of the total lack of real social interaction as a result of spending multudinous hours pursuing the Sim life?
I think the simple accessibility of this kind of addictive 'crack' is an inherently bad thing. I wouldn't ban it, but I would wish that people were more conscious of the life-destroying dangers they face by total immersion in such games.
Mind you, I refer to women in this case almost exclusively because that is the target audience for "The Sims". However, if you want to discuss the failings of men in a multiplayer game environment, i'll be glad to oblige. They have easily as many flaws. Also note that the women who play text muds are a specific group that does not reflect the population at large. So women out there, don't take offense. This isn't necessarily you. It's just a type of person that finds it easy to immerse in online games.
My apologies if I offended anyone, this was no troll.
Poor lefties don't like being called what they are. It's a crying shame.
Something else for the lefty environmental lobby to whine about. What's new? They'll only be happy when we are all living in thatched huts made of biodegradable straw and eating a true vegan diet.
Or dead. I know one such individual who advocates reducing the global carrying capacity to 250 million. i.e. killing off about 5.75 billion of us. In the name of superior environment.
My ancestors mined coal, worked in steel mills, were cops (exposure to lead!) - these things are not optimal careers if you want to live a long time. Neither is computer recycling, at least the way the Chinese do. When they get their act together, i'm sure they'll think up a way to do it in a far less harmful fashion, as we would do it in the US. When they do so, their environment will reap the benefits. Until then, they are masters of their own destiny.
I couldn't care less. Greenpeace and the rest can go get stuffed.
sorry about the bad format. I suck.
Stress that the kowtowing to corporate interests is causing unfair reprecussions for the fine cadets at the USNA. The characterization of the offense as 'theft' is an outright lie. In time of war, how can we tolerate this kind of crass commercialism denigrating the contributions of the US Navy?
Use snail mail, they won't pay attention to an email. Don't let the RIAA have this kind of victory. The service academies are tough enough without this shit.
...at least any current nuclear weapon, it would seem.
The problem with nukes in space is that chemical explosive blocks are used to create the pressure required for the fission chain reaction, whether U235 or Pu. This is the spark plug for the fusion reaction that any large weapon (> 100kt) would need. You'd have to design a system that created those same conditions without using a chemical explosive, or alternatively provide a pressurized compartment where an atmosphere would exist capable of sustaining the explosion.
Then again, I am not a physicist (IANAP?) so maybe someone smarter than me can comment on this seeming problem.
At least a reasonable reply.
Too many morons with mod points at this place. As if pointing out the obvious, that governments don't give a rat's ass about pollution of open source projects with trojan code. Since it's become obvious that the open source community cannot keep its code safe from such attacks, it's something to worry about.
Something -- code vaults, stronger verification checks of code -- whatever, has to be done about it now, or we're going to have to remove all open source stuff from anyone who cares about their systems, meaning government and business.
Knee-jerk support for Open Source is as pathetic as the same for Microsoft. This is a hole you could drive a truck through and a lack of exercise of fiduciary responsibility due to open source zealotry is as bad as what the bastards at Enron did. Fix this, or the open source stuff is coming out of my company, and anywhere I work.
You assholes with mod points aren't going to make this problem go away. It'll be your undoing. I can hear the M$ sales pitch right now...