It was sooo much worse in Planetside. There, it was REALLY important for people to follow the plan, and not Zerg in like retards. I remember an attack where we had three transports flying in, protected by 12 fighters, and as soon as we got sort near the combat zone, all the fighters bugged out, and we lost two of the transports to a mere three fighters. WTF?
That kinda crap happened all the time. Pulling an assault down a hallway, and you pull out your grenade launcher to toss a few grenades around the corner, warn everyone to stay back, then pull the trigger and watch as some moron STEPS IN FRONT OF YOU, and you get the novel experience of watching a full volley of plasma grenades BOUNCE OFF HIS BACK, and fall at your feet, and at the feet of the 20 guys around you.
Getting repeatedly killed by your own artillery. Getting griefed by bored 13 year olds while you're defending a base. It was pretty pathetic, which was sad itself, because it was a great game.
Oh HELLZ YEA! I lost a 70 druid, and a 92 sorc, and that was it for me and DII. I could kinda understand that though...I mean, it was a free service...
Still, for WoW, they have a written policy not to delete inactive characters, which is a hell of a lot better than Sony.
I've played a lot of MMORPGs, and one thing that leapt out at me playing SWG is how slow and cumbersome resource gathering was. If you wanted to be a crafter, you had to commit to spending hours sitting around while your hapless character extracted minerals. I understand this got better in the late game, when you could afford expensive stuff, but in the early game it was a huge timesink of the sort that Sony is best known for, and that was one of many such time sinks I experienced in the ten day free trial that pretty much summed up my SWG experience.
I suppose my question is this: Do you have any plans to make a game that's sole purpose isn't to keep people paying your subscription fees for as long as possible? That particular facet of Sony ideology has turned me off to every Sony game I've ever played.
They used to be just about the only game in town, when it came to MMORPGS. They've got Everquest, Everquest II, Planetside, and SWG.
That being said, the only one of those games I played for any length of time was Planetside. That was a game killed by the fact that most of the players were hordes of 14 year olds...Imagine an epic battle with 100 people on each side, tanks, artillery, planes, all kinds of vehicles, weapons, the works.
Then imagine 90% of those people are idiot 14 year olds.
*Shudder*
I stopped playing it after a while...I had a lvl 20/4 character, which was pretty high, but I've always had the "Only pay for one online game at a time" philosophy, so I cancelled the subscription. Got to wanting to play it again four months later, hoping the weenies had moved on to other things, and found that (of course) my character had been deleted. That was pretty much it for me.
Sony has always had that policy. If your card lapses for an instant, your character is gone. City of Heroes still gets a month out of me here and there, because they never deleted my characters. Blizzard has a firm policy saying they'll never delete characters. To me thats the big dividing line between a company that cares about its customers and return business, and a company that just wants your money. Until sony kills that policy, I'm never subscribing to another one of their games.
I think it's more that people just don't get it. This is an issue that we're only beginning to see, especially in the area of AO games. Better to get it hashed out on a national scale, than deal with the whiny Jack Thompsons of the world for years to come.
I don't really have a problem with age ratings on games, same as on movies. Of course, no one enforces those EITHER, so...
There was this thing....I think it was called "The Civil War", and, when it was over, you know, they'd pretty much decided that while the states had rights, the federal government had more rights.
So no, the state constitution doesn't trump the federal constitution.
"Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
His conviction was overturned because hate speech is still protected, and the assembly was peaceful.
Actually, you're wrong. Inciting to riot is illegal in the US, and has been upheld in the Supremes, and it seems pretty clear that the blogs in question were guilty of this.
As someone who does play, and who understands that virtual things can be worth real world $$$, even in a system not set up to let you convert them directly, I still think it was a dumb idea.
How many MMO's have a long lifetime, or a widespread adoption? Not all of them, not by any stretch.
The dumbness is not in buying virtual land, it's buying virtual land attached to an unproven game. If they'd folded, he would have owned a lot of nothing, with no legal recourse.
Kinda like buying a whole lotta waterfront property...You better hope the waterline doesn't move.
Or any hardcore gamer. I remember playing old school MUDs with guys whose "time played" was measured in months. My own time played in that particular game was a little more than two weeks, unsurpassed until lately when my Warcrack addiction passed the three week barrier.
Re:Can't blind on purpose
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The real reason they used chemical weapons is because they maimed more than they killed. Kill a soldier, and all you need is two guys and a shovel to take care of him. But maim him, and you need food, medical care, medical supplies, and you'll continue to need them for quite some time. It's a nasty kind of logistical warfare, designed to cripple your enemies infrastructure.
It's the same sort of reason Anthrax is the bioweapon of choice...Not all that fatal, but the people who get infected with it require a lot of care. Ebola and other hemmoragic fevers, on the other hand, are back to the two guys and the shovel.
That's not so much a failing of science, as a failing of humanity. The Jews didn't actually react well to Jesus' revolutionary ideas.
This country in particular has had a lot of trouble with new scientific ideas. We were one of the last countries in the world to start teaching the theory of continental drift...almost to the point where it was possible to prove it, and we held on to the catastrophe theory of geology much longer than most other countries.
And this damn evolution debate has been raging here for-freakin-ever, when most of the world thinks we're freaking crazy.
The thing about science is that, given time, the good theories and the bad theories sort themselves out. It's like logic...If you follow good methods, it's hard to keep reasoning with bad premises, so eventually, you have to recheck your early assumptions.
The thing that gets me about Fundamentalism is the whole evangelical influence and all that comes with it. You know you don't really have to have studied anything to be a baptist preacher? Required religious background = zero. Contrast that with the Catholics, who make their priests study for-fricking-ever, and then make some pretty serious lifestyle sacrifices.
Say what you will about the Catholics, they're not anti-intellectual.
Easy. Find fossil evidence that debunks the idea of evolution. A couple of 200 million year old Homo Sapiens skeletons would do it, or proof that large mammals coexisted with dinosaurs, stuff like that.
Evolution depends on progression, and if you can proce that things didn't happen in progression, but randomly, then evolution as a theory will have to be changed to reflect that.
The thing that makes evolution such a strong theory though, is that everything actually DOES seem to happen as a progression, and usually a progression that can be charted by pressures put on by environmental factors, and competition with other species.
When you're more religiously conservative than the Vatican, that should be a big freakin clue sign that your theory sucks. I mean, they don't believe in contraception, but they think evolution is plausible, and doesn't contradict orthodox theology.
I've been running it on my XP box for about a year now, and it's been pretty well behaved. It doesn't lock up, or noticably slow my applications down. Beyond that, you can set it to run in pure screensaver mode, so you can be sure it won't be interfering.
I'll definitely try it out on my low security linux box, but it worries me slightly, because I have a lot of background services running on that one. It'll be interesting to see how well it plays with others.
Heh. But you're circumventing their copy protection using their invasive DRM package. So aren't they to blame for the circumvention? They wrote the code, after all, and adding "$sys$" to a filename is as trivial as holding down the shift key, and the shift key lawsuit was thrown out of court. If only someone else could sue them...
I think Blizzard in particular has a good case against them, since their crazy DRM is being used to circumvent some of Blizz' anti-cheating measures.
Way to fail basic reading comprehension. I type the whole goddamn thing out for you, and you can't be bothered to even read it.
If I take a known fact (ICANN sucks) and extrapolate from that to a general case (standard inductive reasoning), there are any number of inductive fallacies I could be committing, but argument from ignorance isn't one of them, because it ain't an inductive fallacy.
If I didn't know ICANN sucks, and decided to reason using it as a premise, then yes I would be guilty of the old argument from ignorance. Argument from ignorance is most commonly used to prove the existence/non-existence of god...god can't be proven not to exist, therefore he exists or, god can't be proven to exist, therefore he doesn't exist.
Nothing like a smack talking jackass who knows absolutely nothing. Least you're not an anonymous coward.
Efficiency always matters. Most of the problems people have with ICANN are problems with their politics and their buerocracy. And transparency? We don't really have that now.
No country is going to be happy with other countries controlling the domain registries. A neutral third party not beholden to a government (or the UN) is the best solution.
I switched to AMD from Intel on my last build, and I've been totally happy with it...quick, quiet, and reliable, and I've been using Intel as long as you. The last time I switched over (nvidia to ATI), I wasn't nearly so pleased.
Frankly, when it comes to efficiency, democracy sucks. So yea, ICANN run by the US sucks, but ICANN run by the UN would suck 191 times more.
Best case scenario would be a completely independant group funded out of the domain registration fees, chartered to issue domain names impartially, arbitrate disputes, with super-minimal oversight by a bunch of different countries who would have zero say in any desicisions, but would be around just to make sure that corruption wasn't setting in.
Sure, I agree. But since it's much easier to generate an intercept on a password for a key than it is to decrypt a key without it, the human factor is still the weak point.
People use bad security all the time. I'm sure a lot of people use the same password over and over, so even good passwords can be suspect. Moreover, people tend to generate the passwords the same way all the time, so if you grab a few lesser passwords off someone, you may be able to cut down on the time it takes to brute force one of their passwords.
Or you may be able to social engineer it out of them, or swipe it with a keystroke capture, or a well placed camera, or a microphone (didn't someone post a proof of concept for a mic recently?). The possbilities are endless.
It's an interesting question. I generally keep mine all over the place in encrypted form, with a long (too long to memorize) passphrase which I keep on my person. Not an ideal solution. If someone wanted my data that bad, they could nab me off the street before I had a chance to destroy it, then decrypt everything.
The human factor is nearly always where these things break down. My own precautions are paranoid enough for the types of secrets I keep...mostly client data, with nothing illegal. I encrypt it to protect myself from liability, and frankly, I take much greater care of it than my clients, so if someone wanted it that bad, they'd go after them, not me.
I don't know what I'd change if I really really cared. Don't really trust biometrics. I'd probably be more likely to encrypt the data, then move it to secure storage somewhere, so even if my key was compromised, my data might not be. Obviously not much of a solution, if you need it all the time.
I might be tempted toward a physical solution...Wrap my harddrive in thermite or magnesium, with an ignitor...I'd imagine the feds would be pretty savvy to that sort of thing though. Not really very capable with that sort of stuff anyway, so I'd have to be pretty desperate. Seems all too likely to go off on it's own, and then no data. OR the harddrive case might resist it enough that the data would still be readable.
It would take some serious work to really protect the data. The only thing you could really do would be to memorize a hell of a passphrase, write it down NOWHERE, and hold on to it through interrogation. 64 characters with numbers, punctuation, and letters would last a hell of a long time...according to my calculator, 3.51 x 10^118 years, at 10,000 tries a second, and thats only counting for 72 characters, (lower case, upper case, numbers, shift+numbers) which is off by at least 10 from what is available on most keyboards.
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It was sooo much worse in Planetside. There, it was REALLY important for people to follow the plan, and not Zerg in like retards. I remember an attack where we had three transports flying in, protected by 12 fighters, and as soon as we got sort near the combat zone, all the fighters bugged out, and we lost two of the transports to a mere three fighters. WTF?
That kinda crap happened all the time. Pulling an assault down a hallway, and you pull out your grenade launcher to toss a few grenades around the corner, warn everyone to stay back, then pull the trigger and watch as some moron STEPS IN FRONT OF YOU, and you get the novel experience of watching a full volley of plasma grenades BOUNCE OFF HIS BACK, and fall at your feet, and at the feet of the 20 guys around you.
Getting repeatedly killed by your own artillery. Getting griefed by bored 13 year olds while you're defending a base. It was pretty pathetic, which was sad itself, because it was a great game.
Oh HELLZ YEA! I lost a 70 druid, and a 92 sorc, and that was it for me and DII. I could kinda understand that though...I mean, it was a free service...
Still, for WoW, they have a written policy not to delete inactive characters, which is a hell of a lot better than Sony.
I've played a lot of MMORPGs, and one thing that leapt out at me playing SWG is how slow and cumbersome resource gathering was. If you wanted to be a crafter, you had to commit to spending hours sitting around while your hapless character extracted minerals. I understand this got better in the late game, when you could afford expensive stuff, but in the early game it was a huge timesink of the sort that Sony is best known for, and that was one of many such time sinks I experienced in the ten day free trial that pretty much summed up my SWG experience.
I suppose my question is this: Do you have any plans to make a game that's sole purpose isn't to keep people paying your subscription fees for as long as possible? That particular facet of Sony ideology has turned me off to every Sony game I've ever played.
They used to be just about the only game in town, when it came to MMORPGS. They've got Everquest, Everquest II, Planetside, and SWG.
That being said, the only one of those games I played for any length of time was Planetside. That was a game killed by the fact that most of the players were hordes of 14 year olds...Imagine an epic battle with 100 people on each side, tanks, artillery, planes, all kinds of vehicles, weapons, the works.
Then imagine 90% of those people are idiot 14 year olds.
*Shudder*
I stopped playing it after a while...I had a lvl 20/4 character, which was pretty high, but I've always had the "Only pay for one online game at a time" philosophy, so I cancelled the subscription. Got to wanting to play it again four months later, hoping the weenies had moved on to other things, and found that (of course) my character had been deleted. That was pretty much it for me.
Sony has always had that policy. If your card lapses for an instant, your character is gone. City of Heroes still gets a month out of me here and there, because they never deleted my characters. Blizzard has a firm policy saying they'll never delete characters. To me thats the big dividing line between a company that cares about its customers and return business, and a company that just wants your money. Until sony kills that policy, I'm never subscribing to another one of their games.
I think it's more that people just don't get it. This is an issue that we're only beginning to see, especially in the area of AO games. Better to get it hashed out on a national scale, than deal with the whiny Jack Thompsons of the world for years to come.
I don't really have a problem with age ratings on games, same as on movies. Of course, no one enforces those EITHER, so...
There was this thing....I think it was called "The Civil War", and, when it was over, you know, they'd pretty much decided that while the states had rights, the federal government had more rights.
So no, the state constitution doesn't trump the federal constitution.
Read it more closely.
"Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
His conviction was overturned because hate speech is still protected, and the assembly was peaceful.
Actually, you're wrong. Inciting to riot is illegal in the US, and has been upheld in the Supremes, and it seems pretty clear that the blogs in question were guilty of this.
Here's a link from The First Amendment Center
And here is the Wikipedia Entry for Brandenburg v. Ohio, which was the Supreme Court Case that set the predicent.
As someone who does play, and who understands that virtual things can be worth real world $$$, even in a system not set up to let you convert them directly, I still think it was a dumb idea.
How many MMO's have a long lifetime, or a widespread adoption? Not all of them, not by any stretch.
The dumbness is not in buying virtual land, it's buying virtual land attached to an unproven game. If they'd folded, he would have owned a lot of nothing, with no legal recourse.
Kinda like buying a whole lotta waterfront property...You better hope the waterline doesn't move.
Or any hardcore gamer. I remember playing old school MUDs with guys whose "time played" was measured in months. My own time played in that particular game was a little more than two weeks, unsurpassed until lately when my Warcrack addiction passed the three week barrier.
The real reason they used chemical weapons is because they maimed more than they killed. Kill a soldier, and all you need is two guys and a shovel to take care of him. But maim him, and you need food, medical care, medical supplies, and you'll continue to need them for quite some time. It's a nasty kind of logistical warfare, designed to cripple your enemies infrastructure.
It's the same sort of reason Anthrax is the bioweapon of choice...Not all that fatal, but the people who get infected with it require a lot of care. Ebola and other hemmoragic fevers, on the other hand, are back to the two guys and the shovel.
That's not so much a failing of science, as a failing of humanity. The Jews didn't actually react well to Jesus' revolutionary ideas.
This country in particular has had a lot of trouble with new scientific ideas. We were one of the last countries in the world to start teaching the theory of continental drift...almost to the point where it was possible to prove it, and we held on to the catastrophe theory of geology much longer than most other countries.
And this damn evolution debate has been raging here for-freakin-ever, when most of the world thinks we're freaking crazy.
The thing about science is that, given time, the good theories and the bad theories sort themselves out. It's like logic...If you follow good methods, it's hard to keep reasoning with bad premises, so eventually, you have to recheck your early assumptions.
I can only wish the same held true with religion.
The thing that gets me about Fundamentalism is the whole evangelical influence and all that comes with it. You know you don't really have to have studied anything to be a baptist preacher? Required religious background = zero. Contrast that with the Catholics, who make their priests study for-fricking-ever, and then make some pretty serious lifestyle sacrifices.
Say what you will about the Catholics, they're not anti-intellectual.
Easy. Find fossil evidence that debunks the idea of evolution. A couple of 200 million year old Homo Sapiens skeletons would do it, or proof that large mammals coexisted with dinosaurs, stuff like that.
Evolution depends on progression, and if you can proce that things didn't happen in progression, but randomly, then evolution as a theory will have to be changed to reflect that.
The thing that makes evolution such a strong theory though, is that everything actually DOES seem to happen as a progression, and usually a progression that can be charted by pressures put on by environmental factors, and competition with other species.
It's not a tautology. It's actually a fallacy. Guess which one? ;)
It's also open to an infinite regression, which, just as in coding, is a sure sign that there is something wrong with your logic.
When you're more religiously conservative than the Vatican, that should be a big freakin clue sign that your theory sucks. I mean, they don't believe in contraception, but they think evolution is plausible, and doesn't contradict orthodox theology.
To me, that should be end of story.
I've been running it on my XP box for about a year now, and it's been pretty well behaved. It doesn't lock up, or noticably slow my applications down. Beyond that, you can set it to run in pure screensaver mode, so you can be sure it won't be interfering.
I'll definitely try it out on my low security linux box, but it worries me slightly, because I have a lot of background services running on that one. It'll be interesting to see how well it plays with others.
Heh. But you're circumventing their copy protection using their invasive DRM package. So aren't they to blame for the circumvention? They wrote the code, after all, and adding "$sys$" to a filename is as trivial as holding down the shift key, and the shift key lawsuit was thrown out of court. If only someone else could sue them...
I think Blizzard in particular has a good case against them, since their crazy DRM is being used to circumvent some of Blizz' anti-cheating measures.
Way to fail basic reading comprehension. I type the whole goddamn thing out for you, and you can't be bothered to even read it.
If I take a known fact (ICANN sucks) and extrapolate from that to a general case (standard inductive reasoning), there are any number of inductive fallacies I could be committing, but argument from ignorance isn't one of them, because it ain't an inductive fallacy.
If I didn't know ICANN sucks, and decided to reason using it as a premise, then yes I would be guilty of the old argument from ignorance. Argument from ignorance is most commonly used to prove the existence/non-existence of god...god can't be proven not to exist, therefore he exists or, god can't be proven to exist, therefore he doesn't exist.
Nothing like a smack talking jackass who knows absolutely nothing. Least you're not an anonymous coward.
Efficiency always matters. Most of the problems people have with ICANN are problems with their politics and their buerocracy. And transparency? We don't really have that now.
No country is going to be happy with other countries controlling the domain registries. A neutral third party not beholden to a government (or the UN) is the best solution.
I switched to AMD from Intel on my last build, and I've been totally happy with it...quick, quiet, and reliable, and I've been using Intel as long as you. The last time I switched over (nvidia to ATI), I wasn't nearly so pleased.
AMD makes good chips.
Frankly, when it comes to efficiency, democracy sucks. So yea, ICANN run by the US sucks, but ICANN run by the UN would suck 191 times more.
Best case scenario would be a completely independant group funded out of the domain registration fees, chartered to issue domain names impartially, arbitrate disputes, with super-minimal oversight by a bunch of different countries who would have zero say in any desicisions, but would be around just to make sure that corruption wasn't setting in.
Not that anyone would be happy with that.
Oh I know. I just pulled that number out of my ass, to make a point that 2 years for a 4096 bit cypher was pretty absurd.
Still, I wouldn't put that much faith in 128...I wouldn't be surprised if it was as breakable as 56, in the next century.
Sure, I agree. But since it's much easier to generate an intercept on a password for a key than it is to decrypt a key without it, the human factor is still the weak point.
People use bad security all the time. I'm sure a lot of people use the same password over and over, so even good passwords can be suspect. Moreover, people tend to generate the passwords the same way all the time, so if you grab a few lesser passwords off someone, you may be able to cut down on the time it takes to brute force one of their passwords.
Or you may be able to social engineer it out of them, or swipe it with a keystroke capture, or a well placed camera, or a microphone (didn't someone post a proof of concept for a mic recently?). The possbilities are endless.
It's an interesting question. I generally keep mine all over the place in encrypted form, with a long (too long to memorize) passphrase which I keep on my person. Not an ideal solution. If someone wanted my data that bad, they could nab me off the street before I had a chance to destroy it, then decrypt everything.
The human factor is nearly always where these things break down. My own precautions are paranoid enough for the types of secrets I keep...mostly client data, with nothing illegal. I encrypt it to protect myself from liability, and frankly, I take much greater care of it than my clients, so if someone wanted it that bad, they'd go after them, not me.
I don't know what I'd change if I really really cared. Don't really trust biometrics. I'd probably be more likely to encrypt the data, then move it to secure storage somewhere, so even if my key was compromised, my data might not be. Obviously not much of a solution, if you need it all the time.
I might be tempted toward a physical solution...Wrap my harddrive in thermite or magnesium, with an ignitor...I'd imagine the feds would be pretty savvy to that sort of thing though. Not really very capable with that sort of stuff anyway, so I'd have to be pretty desperate. Seems all too likely to go off on it's own, and then no data. OR the harddrive case might resist it enough that the data would still be readable.
It would take some serious work to really protect the data. The only thing you could really do would be to memorize a hell of a passphrase, write it down NOWHERE, and hold on to it through interrogation. 64 characters with numbers, punctuation, and letters would last a hell of a long time...according to my calculator, 3.51 x 10^118 years, at 10,000 tries a second, and thats only counting for 72 characters, (lower case, upper case, numbers, shift+numbers) which is off by at least 10 from what is available on most keyboards.