Hehehe... EverCrack *is* a natural evolution of a MUD. How can people not see that?:P What was her argument...? "We get to *PAY* for this crap, instead of getting it for free...".
Bring on the multi-player! Nothing more satisfying than hearing the crunch of your crowbar thudding off the skull of some poor sap who missed you at close range with a rocket launcher.
Woo, and thanks/. for the games section!
The US isn't sitting on the biggest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in the world, Russia is.
The US has been, in my opinion, the most careful with it's arsenal, and it's the only country in the world to use a nuke in a war.
The US doesn't sell it's weapons of mass destruction to other countries (though it might sell certain components to friendly allies), both to prevent other countries from getting WMD, and the fact that the US doesn't need the money. Can you say the same for Russia, or China? India or Pakistan?
What I meant in my original post when I said some were surprised when the US didn't drop a few nukes, is the fact that the US has consistantly and constantly said it would respond to attacks with WMD in kind. Since the hijackings and attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001 were a new kind of terror attack, a response that included use of tactical nukes wasn't out of the question. Especially considering Afghanistan's cave systems.
And, if they were to use nukes in Afghanistan, it's not out of the realm of possibility that the US might have used the opportunity to remove a bit of resistance in the Gulf.
I think your tone might change if a couple of buildings downtown your city were reduced to flaming rubble, and in one of them was the remains of someone you cared about. I'd bet you'd be there demanding your president do something to the bastards who had done that.
I know up here in Canada we held our breaths wondering what the US would do in the immediate aftermath. I know a few friends in Military Intelligence were surprised a few countries in the Gulf weren't reduced to glass parking lots... but saner heads prevailed.
You have to realize that someone has to be in the military. And your military has to be strong, or you have to have strong friends. Because if you don't, someone else will steam roller over you. How many examples do you need before you realise this?
Do you even know half the pressures your president is under? How he has to balance what he thinks is good for the country against the hotheads who say "nuke em all and let whatever god they worship sort them out" and the softies who want to ring the country in a steel wall, and bury their heads in the sand to shut out the cold harsh realities of the world?
War is hard, brutal and definitely not "civilized". The people who fight in them have to be hard, and that is what the training is for. It's not like there are people in the military who wake up one day and realize, "What, I have to *kill* people?!?". They know what they are signing up for, and that they might go out one day and not come back.
If you aren't in the military, at least support the fighting men and women. If you don't like it, you have plenty of means to try and change it. Vote, protest and rally. If you don't want to do that, find some other country to live in...
I don't know how much more a video game could desensitize you compared to what you can see on TV, read in the newspapers, etc. The world itself is a hard place, everyone is desensitized to a degree. Think about it, how many homeless people do you walk by on a downtown street, people asking for change? I know I used to give change to them, but after a while you become desensitized, if I gave change to all of them, *I'd* be there next to them asking for change too. So a little bit of you is switched off, and for the most part, I'll bet most people ignore the bums except for the odd one or two...
What I would say these video games do is hammer in a reflex motion, you see movement, you turn, pull trigger... do this over and over enough times in a game, and chances are you'd react the same way in real life. Add to that fact that quite a few people could probably load, cock, aim and fire a gun with nothing except from what they've learned watching TV...
Chances are, you would react, turn and fire... but you'd react the same way most people do, turn and be violently ill.... if you were to shoot and kill someone in real life.
Heh, you would be going from one addiction to another. Best way to get away from mudding/evercracking is to turn off the computer, and find something else to do.
I've been there before, both with muds (Redemption) and Dark Ages of Camelot.
EQ is better because of the visual images that you could only imagine. Instead of having to read the room desc, and then let your imagination crank out the visuals, the trees, goblins, wizards, etc. all pop out at you in great colour and 3d graphics.
If you want to wean yourself off of EQ or mudding for that matter, find yourself a first person shooter you can enjoy. You get the same guild one-upmanship, social interaction and button mashing (minus the roleplaying) as EQ or muds, but you don't have to pay a monthly fee. Most FPS game producers typically listen to their customers, patches are usually on a timely schedule and well documented.
I understand your sentiment about people mucking up P2P with big name bands and such. I know it's hard to be a small, unsigned artist.
But if you think the recording and movie industries will allow P2P to stay free, and unhindered, you have another think coming, hard and fast.
Even if the P2P networks were totally clean, and only had legal files to be downloaded, I doubt the recording and movie industries would allow them to live free. Do you think they want people to be able to find you and listen to you without their help? Numerous big names (Tom Petty being one) have tried to distribute their latest singles via P2P, only to have their ideas squashed by their labels. If the big names can get bitchslapped, do you think the little ones won't?
RIAA and MPAA are going to slowly hunt down and kill the P2P networks, and replace them with their own, craptacular, pay P2P networks
Yes, the recording industry says they have lost money due to declining sales. But prove that it's because of P2P.
I hear more and more people saying they buy more cds *because* they are downloading music off the net. Music they'd never consider buying before P2P came along.
The record companies claim they lose money to P2P because they claim each download is a lost sale, which is pure BS.
According to this, I'm stealing everytime I get up to go to the bathroom whenever a commercial comes on the TV. Or if I change the channel.
People should not be forced to look at popup ads.
The only way you could do this would be to have a splash page, stating that in order to browse this site, you must view ads, or allow popups, or whatever it is you want people to agree to. People who don't want to see the ads, can move on to a different site. Those that agree to it, goody for them.
Thing is, most sites don't let you say yes or no to ads, you are forced to experience them whether you want to or not.
"A website cost time and money to run. Every time you visit a website you will cost the webmaster behind that website money as they have to pay for the bandwidth you use when downloading images, information etc."
Ok, and by popping up images, information, flash movies, etc., you're saving bandwidth *HOW*???
"If you start trying to block that income you will still cost the webmaster the same amount of money as before, but the webmaster won't earn any money from advertsing to cover the expence."
If you are going to call us theives, please at least spell expense correctly. Aside from nitpicking their spelling, do they honestly expect we all get *FREE* access to the internet? And that we all have extra time to read and close all the popups that? Our bandwidth costs us too, and our time is money too.
As I browse their site, I have closed at least 7 ads, AND a popup for that stupid Gator spyware.
Heh, they offer spam protection. But, if you follow their logic, blocking spam email is theft. Those spammers take all the time and effort (download list, slap into mass emailing program, hit enter, go read a Tom Clancy novel while the email zips off to inboxes unknown..) to email us with viagra offers, penis enlargers, and 19% credit cards. All that bandwidth they use, and the email lists they have to buy, and we're stealing by not reading their emails.
Heh, here's a blurb on cookies, "What cookies have to do with all this might be hard to understand at first, but blocking cookies can also cause major problems for webmasters. Many sponsors use cookies to track from which site a sale came from. E.g. if you visit a specific site, click an ad and chose to buy something the webmaster of the website you first came from obviously should earn some money from that. When blocking cookies that revenue could be lost..."
Sure, but they don't just want to track what website you came from, what you did at their site, and where you went to next afterwards... since they seem to be buddy-buddy with Gator, they want to know what you're doing on the web, at all times...
And, as seen in previous/. articles, spam is only going to get worse. As seen here, there is a new breed of spam/popup on the horizon.
"Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.
It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything."
So, taking Anti-leech's arguement to the logical extreme, blocking these invasions of privacy would be theft.
Could a case be made for a monopoly breakup? =P For a while, the area I live in only had one cable company (before the local telco got into the game). It had taken over a rival cable company. Heh, only in Canada could a company losing money faster than Worldcom be able to buy a profitable, stable, better service company. =P
"Yes your honour, my clients did this because it was the only way they could get faster service, on the account that Buckeye is the only broadband company. Faster service is available, but conveniently, not in the Buckeye service area..."
"As soon as someone downloads music that they would have otherwise purchased, there is a theft of the money that would have been paid."
Pure horse-hooie. Following this logic, HMV, and just about any other nation-wide music store would be shut down. I can listen to just about any cd I want in HMV, using one of the little headphone stations. Same thing for Future Shop, I can go in and listen to something before I buy. If I go in and listen to a cd, and think it's pure crap, is it theft because I walk out not having purchased the CD?
It's copyright infringement.
Fair use was never intended to apply to mass distribution, true. But RIAA, MPAA, et al., are putting up a concerted effort to squash fair use. They want it so we cannot make the copies entitled to us under fair use, notice the rise of CDs/DVDs that won't run on computers, but only cd/dvd players. How far would this be allowed to go? "You can only listen to our music on this 36hour cd, on this approved cd player only..."
How many people are tired of paying 20 dollars for a cd which has only a couple of good songs?
The only way RIAA, MPAA, etc. will be able to stop p2p distribution of music or movies is to either drop the prices, or allow people to create their own cds/dvds, with only the stuff they want to see or hear. At a decent price.
Techinically, it is legal for the FBI to do what it did. It might have made better PR to have called, or had a friendly "chat", instead of going in. Sure, the cops can give you a ticket for jaywalking, but in doing that they could be ignoring the maniac speeding 100 in a 40 zone. The FBI surely has better things to do, doesn't it?
I have a question for any Toledo Buckeye subscribers, do you actually own the modem? If you do, can you get charged for hacking your own equipment?
Sure, stealing bandwidth is theft, so ya, slap the perps with that crime...
And I'd like to know how they figured out $250,000 in "extra" bandwidth used.
Ya, that's true. But I was hooked on Squaresoft games... still am. It was one of the reasons I traded my NES for a SNES, Final Fantasy II (well, actually FFIV)...
1984. The book that is. Orwell was right in so many ways (the fact that many people have a TV screen in their rooms, or computer screens), and wrong in others.
It's wierd reading scifi, and looking at real life, and you wonder, is life imitating art or the other way around?
As a victim of Civ3, CounterStrike, Diablo, online Chess, etc., etc., I'd have to agree to the digital crack comment.:)
As mentioned in the replies above mine, Gates did say "640k ought to be enough for anybody". That and the chairman of IBM saying he couldn't see a market for more than 5 computers. I assume he meant one for each permanent member of the UN Security Council.
Hindsight may be 20/20, but it still amazes me that these "visionaries" had such dim views of the future.
Heh. "Their sound is off, and we think guitar music is on it's way out". That was said to the Beatles... hah, someone kicked themselves for that later.
Also, if you check out this months issue of EGM, you'll find an interview with one of the head honcho's at Nintendo. They're going to be using the GBA as a controller for more game in the future.
Great! So the Gamecube will end up costing *more* than the Xbox and Playstation....
It used to be that I would be like the fanboy a buncha posts up. Nintendo rocked. First kid on the block to have the NES. Traded it all in for the SNES. Moved on up to the N64, and that was, and will ever be, the last Nintendo thing I will buy.
They dropped the ball. They had the lead, and it seemed they knew what people wanted. Why the heck couldn't they stick a freakin' CD/DVD in the N64?
They were the first with the party games, back on the SNES, I remember having 5 people playing NHL94, which was hugely entertaining. They had a lot of good ideas, stuff the Xbox and Playstation could learn from (helloooo, only one controller and no games?? wtf!?!?).
I don't think it was irresponsible for the bug to be posted and described in the manner it was. The more clues you give out, the more likely someone will figure it out, and exploit it. It's not like they were writing a proggy for the scriptkiddies.
Better to be out with the whole thing, and put pressure on MicroSoft to fix it, than to be cryptic about it.
Another day, another mack-truck sized hole in an MS product. People sound surprised by this... =P
Slashdot Mirror
Hehehe... EverCrack *is* a natural evolution of a MUD. How can people not see that? :P What was her argument...? "We get to *PAY* for this crap, instead of getting it for free...".
Bring on the multi-player! Nothing more satisfying than hearing the crunch of your crowbar thudding off the skull of some poor sap who missed you at close range with a rocket launcher. Woo, and thanks /. for the games section!
The US isn't sitting on the biggest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in the world, Russia is.
The US has been, in my opinion, the most careful with it's arsenal, and it's the only country in the world to use a nuke in a war.
The US doesn't sell it's weapons of mass destruction to other countries (though it might sell certain components to friendly allies), both to prevent other countries from getting WMD, and the fact that the US doesn't need the money. Can you say the same for Russia, or China? India or Pakistan?
What I meant in my original post when I said some were surprised when the US didn't drop a few nukes, is the fact that the US has consistantly and constantly said it would respond to attacks with WMD in kind. Since the hijackings and attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001 were a new kind of terror attack, a response that included use of tactical nukes wasn't out of the question. Especially considering Afghanistan's cave systems.
And, if they were to use nukes in Afghanistan, it's not out of the realm of possibility that the US might have used the opportunity to remove a bit of resistance in the Gulf.
I think your tone might change if a couple of buildings downtown your city were reduced to flaming rubble, and in one of them was the remains of someone you cared about. I'd bet you'd be there demanding your president do something to the bastards who had done that.
I know up here in Canada we held our breaths wondering what the US would do in the immediate aftermath. I know a few friends in Military Intelligence were surprised a few countries in the Gulf weren't reduced to glass parking lots... but saner heads prevailed.
You have to realize that someone has to be in the military. And your military has to be strong, or you have to have strong friends. Because if you don't, someone else will steam roller over you. How many examples do you need before you realise this?
Do you even know half the pressures your president is under? How he has to balance what he thinks is good for the country against the hotheads who say "nuke em all and let whatever god they worship sort them out" and the softies who want to ring the country in a steel wall, and bury their heads in the sand to shut out the cold harsh realities of the world?
War is hard, brutal and definitely not "civilized". The people who fight in them have to be hard, and that is what the training is for. It's not like there are people in the military who wake up one day and realize, "What, I have to *kill* people?!?". They know what they are signing up for, and that they might go out one day and not come back.
If you aren't in the military, at least support the fighting men and women. If you don't like it, you have plenty of means to try and change it. Vote, protest and rally. If you don't want to do that, find some other country to live in...
I don't know how much more a video game could desensitize you compared to what you can see on TV, read in the newspapers, etc. The world itself is a hard place, everyone is desensitized to a degree. Think about it, how many homeless people do you walk by on a downtown street, people asking for change? I know I used to give change to them, but after a while you become desensitized, if I gave change to all of them, *I'd* be there next to them asking for change too. So a little bit of you is switched off, and for the most part, I'll bet most people ignore the bums except for the odd one or two... What I would say these video games do is hammer in a reflex motion, you see movement, you turn, pull trigger... do this over and over enough times in a game, and chances are you'd react the same way in real life. Add to that fact that quite a few people could probably load, cock, aim and fire a gun with nothing except from what they've learned watching TV... Chances are, you would react, turn and fire... but you'd react the same way most people do, turn and be violently ill.... if you were to shoot and kill someone in real life.
Heh, you would be going from one addiction to another. Best way to get away from mudding/evercracking is to turn off the computer, and find something else to do.
I've been there before, both with muds (Redemption) and Dark Ages of Camelot.
EQ is better because of the visual images that you could only imagine. Instead of having to read the room desc, and then let your imagination crank out the visuals, the trees, goblins, wizards, etc. all pop out at you in great colour and 3d graphics.
If you want to wean yourself off of EQ or mudding for that matter, find yourself a first person shooter you can enjoy. You get the same guild one-upmanship, social interaction and button mashing (minus the roleplaying) as EQ or muds, but you don't have to pay a monthly fee. Most FPS game producers typically listen to their customers, patches are usually on a timely schedule and well documented.
Heh, no conspiracy, just watch.
Napster's gone, do you think they'll let the other P2P networks off?
I hate to burst your bubble a bit...
I understand your sentiment about people mucking up P2P with big name bands and such. I know it's hard to be a small, unsigned artist.
But if you think the recording and movie industries will allow P2P to stay free, and unhindered, you have another think coming, hard and fast.
Even if the P2P networks were totally clean, and only had legal files to be downloaded, I doubt the recording and movie industries would allow them to live free. Do you think they want people to be able to find you and listen to you without their help? Numerous big names (Tom Petty being one) have tried to distribute their latest singles via P2P, only to have their ideas squashed by their labels. If the big names can get bitchslapped, do you think the little ones won't?
RIAA and MPAA are going to slowly hunt down and kill the P2P networks, and replace them with their own, craptacular, pay P2P networks
End result? Your band's still out in the cold.
I'd like them to prove that they lost sales.
Yes, the recording industry says they have lost money due to declining sales. But prove that it's because of P2P.
I hear more and more people saying they buy more cds *because* they are downloading music off the net. Music they'd never consider buying before P2P came along.
The record companies claim they lose money to P2P because they claim each download is a lost sale, which is pure BS.
As mentioned above, he'll either leave us breathless with his genious, or pissed off with his audacity.
Lets hope he's good this time round.
According to this, I'm stealing everytime I get up to go to the bathroom whenever a commercial comes on the TV. Or if I change the channel.
People should not be forced to look at popup ads.
The only way you could do this would be to have a splash page, stating that in order to browse this site, you must view ads, or allow popups, or whatever it is you want people to agree to. People who don't want to see the ads, can move on to a different site. Those that agree to it, goody for them.
Thing is, most sites don't let you say yes or no to ads, you are forced to experience them whether you want to or not.
How can they get away with this?
/. articles, spam is only going to get worse. As seen here, there is a new breed of spam/popup on the horizon.
Can you say class-action libel suit??
"A website cost time and money to run. Every time you visit a website you will cost the webmaster behind that website money as they have to pay for the bandwidth you use when downloading images, information etc."
Ok, and by popping up images, information, flash movies, etc., you're saving bandwidth *HOW*???
"If you start trying to block that income you will still cost the webmaster the same amount of money as before, but the webmaster won't earn any money from advertsing to cover the expence."
If you are going to call us theives, please at least spell expense correctly. Aside from nitpicking their spelling, do they honestly expect we all get *FREE* access to the internet? And that we all have extra time to read and close all the popups that? Our bandwidth costs us too, and our time is money too.
As I browse their site, I have closed at least 7 ads, AND a popup for that stupid Gator spyware.
Heh, they offer spam protection. But, if you follow their logic, blocking spam email is theft. Those spammers take all the time and effort (download list, slap into mass emailing program, hit enter, go read a Tom Clancy novel while the email zips off to inboxes unknown..) to email us with viagra offers, penis enlargers, and 19% credit cards. All that bandwidth they use, and the email lists they have to buy, and we're stealing by not reading their emails.
Heh, here's a blurb on cookies, "What cookies have to do with all this might be hard to understand at first, but blocking cookies can also cause major problems for webmasters. Many sponsors use cookies to track from which site a sale came from. E.g. if you visit a specific site, click an ad and chose to buy something the webmaster of the website you first came from obviously should earn some money from that. When blocking cookies that revenue could be lost..."
Sure, but they don't just want to track what website you came from, what you did at their site, and where you went to next afterwards... since they seem to be buddy-buddy with Gator, they want to know what you're doing on the web, at all times...
And, as seen in previous
"Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.
It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything."
So, taking Anti-leech's arguement to the logical extreme, blocking these invasions of privacy would be theft.
Ain't technology grand?
Hrm...
Could a case be made for a monopoly breakup? =P For a while, the area I live in only had one cable company (before the local telco got into the game). It had taken over a rival cable company. Heh, only in Canada could a company losing money faster than Worldcom be able to buy a profitable, stable, better service company. =P
"Yes your honour, my clients did this because it was the only way they could get faster service, on the account that Buckeye is the only broadband company. Faster service is available, but conveniently, not in the Buckeye service area..."
"As soon as someone downloads music that they would have otherwise purchased, there is a theft of the money that would have been paid."
Pure horse-hooie. Following this logic, HMV, and just about any other nation-wide music store would be shut down. I can listen to just about any cd I want in HMV, using one of the little headphone stations. Same thing for Future Shop, I can go in and listen to something before I buy. If I go in and listen to a cd, and think it's pure crap, is it theft because I walk out not having purchased the CD?
It's copyright infringement.
Fair use was never intended to apply to mass distribution, true. But RIAA, MPAA, et al., are putting up a concerted effort to squash fair use. They want it so we cannot make the copies entitled to us under fair use, notice the rise of CDs/DVDs that won't run on computers, but only cd/dvd players. How far would this be allowed to go? "You can only listen to our music on this 36hour cd, on this approved cd player only..."
How many people are tired of paying 20 dollars for a cd which has only a couple of good songs?
The only way RIAA, MPAA, etc. will be able to stop p2p distribution of music or movies is to either drop the prices, or allow people to create their own cds/dvds, with only the stuff they want to see or hear. At a decent price.
Heh, you may not like them, but what I was trying to point out is that they were hugely popular..
Just like we use more than 640k, and only a market for 5 computers was vastly under-rated.
Just goes to show, that no matter how narrowminded one person may be, there's someone out there willing to give anything a shot.
Techinically, it is legal for the FBI to do what it did. It might have made better PR to have called, or had a friendly "chat", instead of going in. Sure, the cops can give you a ticket for jaywalking, but in doing that they could be ignoring the maniac speeding 100 in a 40 zone. The FBI surely has better things to do, doesn't it?
I have a question for any Toledo Buckeye subscribers, do you actually own the modem? If you do, can you get charged for hacking your own equipment?
Sure, stealing bandwidth is theft, so ya, slap the perps with that crime...
And I'd like to know how they figured out $250,000 in "extra" bandwidth used.
Ya, that's true. But I was hooked on Squaresoft games... still am. It was one of the reasons I traded my NES for a SNES, Final Fantasy II (well, actually FFIV)...
1984. The book that is. Orwell was right in so many ways (the fact that many people have a TV screen in their rooms, or computer screens), and wrong in others.
:)
It's wierd reading scifi, and looking at real life, and you wonder, is life imitating art or the other way around?
As a victim of Civ3, CounterStrike, Diablo, online Chess, etc., etc., I'd have to agree to the digital crack comment.
Heh, the smiley face is 20 years old this year...
As mentioned in the replies above mine, Gates did say "640k ought to be enough for anybody". That and the chairman of IBM saying he couldn't see a market for more than 5 computers. I assume he meant one for each permanent member of the UN Security Council.
Hindsight may be 20/20, but it still amazes me that these "visionaries" had such dim views of the future.
Heh. "Their sound is off, and we think guitar music is on it's way out". That was said to the Beatles... hah, someone kicked themselves for that later.
Ya, notice a slight lack of Square games for the N64? Square wanted cd/dvd, and Sony gave it to them first.
Also, if you check out this months issue of EGM, you'll find an interview with one of the head honcho's at Nintendo. They're going to be using the GBA as a controller for more game in the future.
Great! So the Gamecube will end up costing *more* than the Xbox and Playstation....
It used to be that I would be like the fanboy a buncha posts up. Nintendo rocked. First kid on the block to have the NES. Traded it all in for the SNES. Moved on up to the N64, and that was, and will ever be, the last Nintendo thing I will buy.
They dropped the ball. They had the lead, and it seemed they knew what people wanted. Why the heck couldn't they stick a freakin' CD/DVD in the N64?
They were the first with the party games, back on the SNES, I remember having 5 people playing NHL94, which was hugely entertaining. They had a lot of good ideas, stuff the Xbox and Playstation could learn from (helloooo, only one controller and no games?? wtf!?!?).
Losing Squaresoft was one of the last straws too.
Mine has to be the remote control car he has in Tomorrow Never Dies.
That and the exploding pen in Goldeneye.
Yep, it's a game.
But it's a game imitating life. It's only a matter of time before someone organized online protests this way.
And you have to admit, the article is funny.
If there are enough protests, will the EA create riot police, tear gas and batons?
I don't think it was irresponsible for the bug to be posted and described in the manner it was. The more clues you give out, the more likely someone will figure it out, and exploit it. It's not like they were writing a proggy for the scriptkiddies.
Better to be out with the whole thing, and put pressure on MicroSoft to fix it, than to be cryptic about it.
Another day, another mack-truck sized hole in an MS product. People sound surprised by this... =P