I think many people get excited about Netscape news because many of us want them to win a battle they lost a decade ago.
I was lulled into Internet Explorer from the start, because that's what my ISP's software shipped with, and at the time, the browser and the ISP software were synonymous to me. I didn't have any technical knowledge, my girlfriend had to explain to me how to open an.mp3 file. If my computer didn't natively handle a format, end of story.
Anyway, I digress. A lot of us have fond memories of Netscape, including myself. I remember when I switched to using "Netscape.net" email, and the Netscape web browser. It was an exciting time for me, because I felt like I had a choice in the software I used to view the web. Even though my choices are greater still (Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Kameleon, etc., my perception was different. The nostalgic feeling of discovering there was another option felt so much more important at the time. Now, I can switch between browsers and Operating Systems easily, but back then, Netscape represented a diversity that scarcely existed.
In 1995, Widows and "internet" were synonyms to me. It was only in discovering Netscape that the idea of modularity even occurred to me. That I could view the internet in a different way but still have the same computer.
Netscape has made no small number of mistakes over the years, but all that is forgivable because of the moment of clarity they afforded me. Will the next version of Netscape be a technical rival to IE or Firefox? Maybe not, but I'll try it anyway. Benefit of the doubt and all that.
I think one of the reasons Dell has been slipping (and I believe it has a lot to do with many corporate failures) is that the executives forget what made the company successful in the first place. The company has become so wrapped up in acquisitions, promotions, and partnerships that they forgot all about building computers.
They no longer ask themselves "Which components would make this PC powerful and affordable?"
Instead they ask "Which components can we build a computer from, using only our partners' components, that will not compete with any of our other divisions, and is consistent with this month's slogan?"
It's a lot like Microsoft. At a certain point they got so wrapped up in their ISP (MSN), web sites, content portals, partnerships, search engines, the whole idea of building an actual Operating System was completely beyond them. For all the jokes people made about Windows back with Win 3.1 and Windows 95, all of it would have been forgotten if they had kept their eye on the prize. Instead, they get distracted by every trend, buzzword, and internet start-up that happens by.
Dell has the money, reputation, and manpower to build great computers. Unfortunately they lack the all-consuming vision that makes a company succeed to start with.
A Slashdot submitter says that Arstechnica says that Businessweek's Ronald Grover says that an unnamed studio executive admitted DRM is not about piracy.
Even if we skip the verifiable chain, we're still left with Ronald Grover says that an unnamed studio executive admitted DRM is not about piracy.
Very few responses to this submission comment on the article, instead issues about DRM are discussed directly.
I think you're rightfully fed up with throwing hardware at a problem. Hardware isn't as cheap and easy to come by as some developers believe.
Waste can be seen if you look at things like the ATI Catalyst Control Center (CCC). It occupies 60mb-70mb of memory persistently. Am I to believe that the CCC is several times more complex and contains several times more data than the entirety of the Windows 3.1 operating system? (obvious cracks about Windows aside)
We still haven't even used the full capability of a 300mhz processor and 32mb video card. The bottleneck is not hardware, it's software. Inefficient code, outdated methodologies, and improper application of libraries is a much greater bottleneck than the hardware in any system.
More cycles and more memory doesn't mean that developers are capable of using better graphics and logic, it means they can be lazier in their optimization. Games which take up 5gb of hard drive space do so because they can, not because they must. Developers know the user has 100+ gigabytes available on their hard drive, so no further optimization is necessary. They know that the video card has 256mb or more memory, so they don't optimize the game anymore than they need to. We only need 3ghz processors because developers can throw away as many cycles as they want. On a needs basis, the actual logic and graphics of the most powerful game available probably would require a 300mhz processor and 32mb of video memory. All the rest is a buffer for waste.
This isn't a sleight against coders, I'm a professional developer too. I've seen a lot of applications that could be optimized further but other tasks are much higher up the priority tree because even though the program could be more efficient, it doesn't need to be.
I decided I'm no longer going to waste any time constructing well-reasoned arguments in opposition of people who want to inhibit basic human freedoms. Going forward all I care to say to such people is: Interesting proposal, no thanks, goodbye.
Bill Gates was the head of the company. The company acted at his direction. For all intents and purposes, he is the same as the company. You can't say "The car ran the guy over, the driver didn't."
You're right, nothing stops Bill Gates from acting like Larry Ellison, but morality is not a profit margin. You don't just tally up the good and bad and see if someone comes out in the black. If I walk around punching people, when someone wants me to be accountable I can't just break out a calculator and say "Look, according to my balance sheet I've only punched 39 people, but I donated food to 57 people so I'm good to go. Thanks for checking in with me though."
No speeding is not comparable to killing a man. But actions don't become better just because there's something worse.
If someone steals $10,000 from you, and you find out some time later he's started his own business, living quite well in a Florida condo, and he's running an animal shelter, do you tell him what a great guy he is?
I agree that foundations have a tendency to have their original intentions become distorted. I just think there should be some way to preserve it without complete dissolution being the best course of action.
A side note: Not sure how I ended up getting modded troll, that seemed odd.
The point is, there's always "something worse". You can't say that someone's actions aren't reprehensible just because you can think of something more reprehensible. It has nothing to do with the relative comparison.
Somehow employing child slaves doesn't seem as morally objectionable as raping babies or something like that. There are even people who wouldn't find raping babies objectionable at all, even though that's a small minority. Do you think breaking one law is the same as breaking any law? I see the baby raper as a middle class college dropout, but at least he gives money to charity. What can you say for yourself? What can I say for myself?
Mr. Gates has proven Machiavelli correct. As time marches forward, critics of Microsoft and Bill Gates are changing their tune; what Mr. Gates ultimately does with his wealth is more important than where it came from or how he got started building the wealth. Anti-trust violations, corporate bullying, it's acceptable so long as you later form a charity.
I think it would be a better move to establish organizational policies that dictate an amount or percentage that must be donated over certain time periods, instead of effectively forcing the end of a charitable foundation.
Building such a large foundation is no small task, it just seems like a waste to dissolve all the work that went into it just because the founders aren't alive. I think it would be smarter to establish a policy that prevents it from hoarding assets and forces continued charitable work. Sort of like a charity/monetary GPL.
I know that probably sounds rational to you, but a real solution always involves words like "burn", "hang", "topple", "rise up against", and "rebel group".
I did not see any of those in your idea. I saw the word "smoke" which got me all worked up for a minute, but then it turned out you were still being logical.
Humans have escaped the phenomenon of Natural Selection, for the most part.
All of us who wear glasses? We should have been culled. All these people developing diabetes from eating too much sugar? Selected against. Asthma? You get the picture.
Your assertion presupposes that those genetic traits are actually inferior and not suitable for continued survival, which is unknowable until evolution has a chance to ferret them out. Poor eyesight could very well be an evolutionary advantage. Many predators have notoriously poor eyesight (for example monitor lizards and cats), but can hear/smell/taste far better which makes them great hunters and excellent candidates for evolutionary survival.
Diabetes? Type 2 diabetes can often go untreated (medically) managed solely by exercise and diet. The abundance of society's processed foods which contain obscene amounts of sugar is the biggest enemy of type 2. So you have a genetic class of people that need to exercise more and eat healthier.
I'm not saying that every disease is actually an advantage, but it's presumptuous of us to believe, from our limited temporal footprint in the history of evolution, that we can tell the difference between an evolutionary advantage and a weakness that should be culled. It frequently takes many thousands of years for natural selection to determine a victor in terms of evolution, and often times species we would consider inferior have prevailed over seemingly superior creatures.
At this point in time, things we might consciously decide to cull from the gene pool with genetic modification may actually be against our own interests. One person says "We fixed his eyes", another person says "But you broke his ears".
Carry a non-driver's license form of ID. Personally, I carry my U.S. passport. Some people think it's strange when I show them my passport and I've got semi-frequent comments that they've never seen someone use a passport as ID.
It's only ever been refused once, at a gas station when I was 22, a store refused to sell cigarettes to me because they said it wasn't a valid form of ID. The pleasure I received from staring ignorance in the face far exceeded any sense of rejection.
The need to compel people to adopt a solution is not, in itself, an argument that the solution is unnecessary. Applying game theory, even given a dominant strategy consumers may actually choose the weaker strategy because they lack the cognitive level required to understand which strategy is better.
Many consumers will choose what is familiar over what is better, even given a clear-cut advantage. For example, many dial-up users will refuse to switch to a broadband connection, even if the offer has all of the following properties:
Equal or lesser price
Equal or greater reliability/uptime
More bandwidth
Less latency
This type of decision making can also be observed in solar panel sales. A consumer who can afford a $25,000 solar panel setup and has the government offer a $25,000 subsidy (effectively paying $0 for a lifetime reduction of 80% of their energy bill), will still not have it installed. This behavior is a result of 3 related fallacies. The "Burden of Proof", "Appeal to Tradition", and "Fallacy of Pride".
Burden of Proof - It is much harder for Microsoft to prove Office 97 is inferior to Office 2007 than it is for a user of Office 97 to prove Office 2007 doesn't meet their needs as effectively as Office 97 does. This is because Microsoft does not know the needs of the user in question, only the user does, and therefore the burden of proof is on the person making the assessment.
Appeal to Tradition fallacy - This is what I've always had and it has always worked for me, therefore it must be the dominant strategy.
Fallacy of Pride - People want to believe the initial choice they made was intelligent. Changing strategies would imply that their previous choice was not intelligent. Therefore, the intelligent choice is to not change strategies.
That's just low. Most NRA members are responsible adults who just want the right to bear arms and protect themselves and their families. They're not crazy gun-toting lunatics with hair-trigger rifles and bad tempers.
First, most of the videos on YouTube where people get shocked and are not disabled are the use of "Stun Guns" not tasers (Even though the videos are labeled as tasers), or they are dry stuns which are considerably weaker than a live stun.
Second the effect of a taser is inconsistent due to uncontrollable variables. Body fat, sodium levels, iron levels, and some people have naturally higher pain tolerances. It's not a fair comparison to say that, you saw someone else resist therefore any other subject should be able to do the same thing.
I agree. People treat projects like they're directly exchangeable on a 1-for-1 basis with a resource of a different kind. Like for every dollar you spend on computers is exactly the same equivalence of food. Unfortunately, diminishing returns comes into play. At a certain point, a $100 laptop provides higher marginal utility than additional food. The overall education level of the country and the accessibility of the nation to internet resources may outweigh the same dollar amount spent on more food, medicine, or some other resource.
Division of labor is important. Just because you spend x number of dollars to train additional medical personnel doesn't mean that instantly those people who have intellect suited for engineering/computer science will be able to transition to medicine because you've given it additional funding.
I've got a friend who's a cheater. Most recently the game he is cheating at is Rakion. But that's not the first or last game he's going to cheat at. He starts every game the same, playing legitimately for a couple weeks, then he starts talking about people he notices cheating, at first he takes screenshots and reports the cheaters, but he's impatient. If the people he reports aren't punished immediately he gets mad and thinks the company doesn't care about the game. [That's the point where I can see he's getting ready to do it himself]
About two weeks into playing, he starts sending private messages to cheaters and gets to be acquaintances with them. A couple more days go by and he's running a cheat himself. He'll justify it by saying the company doesn't care anyway because they don't stop cheaters (implying the company tacitly approves of his behavior). A week or two later he'll get caught and dealt some kind of punishment. If it's not a complete ban he'll stop cheating for a little while, but then cheaters who get away with it bother him more than ever, he goes on this hypocritical/psychotic rampage reporting cheaters by the dozen, essentially trying to harass the company into dealing with cheaters. That lasts for about a week before he starts cheating again, and gets another punishment. At that point, he thinks he's smarter than the game company, so he'll find little ways to cheat, small exploits that he thinks will go unnoticed. Instead of obvious cheats, he tries adjusting game properties by small values he thinks no one will notice. For example, instead of cheating to gain infinite health, he boosts his health by 5%-10%. That goes on for maybe another month until the company bans him permanently.
At that point he gets self-righteous and rants about the following topics in no specific order:
They drove him to it by the game's rules being too restrictive
The GMs are losers who have nothing better to do than to spy on someone who isn't hurting anyone
There are worse cheaters out there to catch, it doesn't make sense that they target him
He didn't know the exploit he was using was considered cheating
He thought the cheat program was just a stat tracker
The game sucks anyway
Now they're not going to get any money out of him (He usually never paid for the game and wouldn't fork over a dime even if he played for 50 years)
It's not any specific game, it's every game he plays, the same cycle. I try to keep him honest, inspire him to take pleasure in normal gaming behavior, but he can't. He's supernaturally compelled to cheat. It's disappointing because I don't get to play games with him that we could enjoy together. It's always fun for the first couple of weeks, and I'm always thoroughly convinced that he's really not going to cheat this time, but after he breaks into the cheating cycle I distance my play from him because I don't want to play with or against someone I know is cheating, and I don't want my accounts to become associated with his in the eyes of the GMs (which has happened on more than one occasion).
One day, I actually got a phone call from a GM that wanted to know how I knew him and wanted to know how he convinced me to open an account for him after he got banned. This wasn't the first time he was banned, he had received a lifetime ban from this game 5 or 6 times, but he always finds ways to get someone to let them use their account. The GM discovered that he was playing on my account because my friend told one of his game acquaintances who he was. He revels in infamy. He can't play a game for the game's sake, he needs people to know who he is. Even if it means that his best friend's account is in jeopardy, he'd rather screw his friend over than risk having people in a game not know how clever he is in circumventing the system. Before I gave him access to a slot on my account, I pleaded with him to just play the game and not tell anyone who he was
Slashdot Mirror
You must be new to the internet. They write all of those.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. I swear I've read this exact same thing at least a dozen times over the last 2 years.
I think many people get excited about Netscape news because many of us want them to win a battle they lost a decade ago.
I was lulled into Internet Explorer from the start, because that's what my ISP's software shipped with, and at the time, the browser and the ISP software were synonymous to me. I didn't have any technical knowledge, my girlfriend had to explain to me how to open an .mp3 file. If my computer didn't natively handle a format, end of story.
Anyway, I digress. A lot of us have fond memories of Netscape, including myself. I remember when I switched to using "Netscape.net" email, and the Netscape web browser. It was an exciting time for me, because I felt like I had a choice in the software I used to view the web. Even though my choices are greater still (Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Kameleon, etc., my perception was different. The nostalgic feeling of discovering there was another option felt so much more important at the time. Now, I can switch between browsers and Operating Systems easily, but back then, Netscape represented a diversity that scarcely existed.
In 1995, Widows and "internet" were synonyms to me. It was only in discovering Netscape that the idea of modularity even occurred to me. That I could view the internet in a different way but still have the same computer.
Netscape has made no small number of mistakes over the years, but all that is forgivable because of the moment of clarity they afforded me. Will the next version of Netscape be a technical rival to IE or Firefox? Maybe not, but I'll try it anyway. Benefit of the doubt and all that.
I think one of the reasons Dell has been slipping (and I believe it has a lot to do with many corporate failures) is that the executives forget what made the company successful in the first place. The company has become so wrapped up in acquisitions, promotions, and partnerships that they forgot all about building computers. They no longer ask themselves "Which components would make this PC powerful and affordable?" Instead they ask "Which components can we build a computer from, using only our partners' components, that will not compete with any of our other divisions, and is consistent with this month's slogan?" It's a lot like Microsoft. At a certain point they got so wrapped up in their ISP (MSN), web sites, content portals, partnerships, search engines, the whole idea of building an actual Operating System was completely beyond them. For all the jokes people made about Windows back with Win 3.1 and Windows 95, all of it would have been forgotten if they had kept their eye on the prize. Instead, they get distracted by every trend, buzzword, and internet start-up that happens by. Dell has the money, reputation, and manpower to build great computers. Unfortunately they lack the all-consuming vision that makes a company succeed to start with.
A Slashdot submitter says that Arstechnica says that Businessweek's Ronald Grover says that an unnamed studio executive admitted DRM is not about piracy.
Even if we skip the verifiable chain, we're still left with Ronald Grover says that an unnamed studio executive admitted DRM is not about piracy.
Very few responses to this submission comment on the article, instead issues about DRM are discussed directly.
I think you're rightfully fed up with throwing hardware at a problem. Hardware isn't as cheap and easy to come by as some developers believe. Waste can be seen if you look at things like the ATI Catalyst Control Center (CCC). It occupies 60mb-70mb of memory persistently. Am I to believe that the CCC is several times more complex and contains several times more data than the entirety of the Windows 3.1 operating system? (obvious cracks about Windows aside)
We still haven't even used the full capability of a 300mhz processor and 32mb video card. The bottleneck is not hardware, it's software. Inefficient code, outdated methodologies, and improper application of libraries is a much greater bottleneck than the hardware in any system.
More cycles and more memory doesn't mean that developers are capable of using better graphics and logic, it means they can be lazier in their optimization. Games which take up 5gb of hard drive space do so because they can, not because they must. Developers know the user has 100+ gigabytes available on their hard drive, so no further optimization is necessary. They know that the video card has 256mb or more memory, so they don't optimize the game anymore than they need to. We only need 3ghz processors because developers can throw away as many cycles as they want. On a needs basis, the actual logic and graphics of the most powerful game available probably would require a 300mhz processor and 32mb of video memory. All the rest is a buffer for waste.
This isn't a sleight against coders, I'm a professional developer too. I've seen a lot of applications that could be optimized further but other tasks are much higher up the priority tree because even though the program could be more efficient, it doesn't need to be.
I decided I'm no longer going to waste any time constructing well-reasoned arguments in opposition of people who want to inhibit basic human freedoms. Going forward all I care to say to such people is: Interesting proposal, no thanks, goodbye.
"...Bill Gates != Microsoft..."
Bill Gates was the head of the company. The company acted at his direction. For all intents and purposes, he is the same as the company. You can't say "The car ran the guy over, the driver didn't."
You're right, nothing stops Bill Gates from acting like Larry Ellison, but morality is not a profit margin. You don't just tally up the good and bad and see if someone comes out in the black. If I walk around punching people, when someone wants me to be accountable I can't just break out a calculator and say "Look, according to my balance sheet I've only punched 39 people, but I donated food to 57 people so I'm good to go. Thanks for checking in with me though."
No speeding is not comparable to killing a man. But actions don't become better just because there's something worse.
If someone steals $10,000 from you, and you find out some time later he's started his own business, living quite well in a Florida condo, and he's running an animal shelter, do you tell him what a great guy he is?
I agree that foundations have a tendency to have their original intentions become distorted. I just think there should be some way to preserve it without complete dissolution being the best course of action.
A side note: Not sure how I ended up getting modded troll, that seemed odd.
The point is, there's always "something worse". You can't say that someone's actions aren't reprehensible just because you can think of something more reprehensible. It has nothing to do with the relative comparison.
Somehow employing child slaves doesn't seem as morally objectionable as raping babies or something like that. There are even people who wouldn't find raping babies objectionable at all, even though that's a small minority. Do you think breaking one law is the same as breaking any law? I see the baby raper as a middle class college dropout, but at least he gives money to charity. What can you say for yourself? What can I say for myself?
Mr. Gates has proven Machiavelli correct. As time marches forward, critics of Microsoft and Bill Gates are changing their tune; what Mr. Gates ultimately does with his wealth is more important than where it came from or how he got started building the wealth. Anti-trust violations, corporate bullying, it's acceptable so long as you later form a charity.
I think it would be a better move to establish organizational policies that dictate an amount or percentage that must be donated over certain time periods, instead of effectively forcing the end of a charitable foundation.
Building such a large foundation is no small task, it just seems like a waste to dissolve all the work that went into it just because the founders aren't alive. I think it would be smarter to establish a policy that prevents it from hoarding assets and forces continued charitable work. Sort of like a charity/monetary GPL.
I know that probably sounds rational to you, but a real solution always involves words like "burn", "hang", "topple", "rise up against", and "rebel group".
I did not see any of those in your idea. I saw the word "smoke" which got me all worked up for a minute, but then it turned out you were still being logical.
I agree that copyright laws are too complicated. I don't even believe in the idea of copyright, although I do follow it solely because it's law.
I don't think more laws create more crime.
More Laws : More Crime
Lowering The Passing Grade : Smarter Students
Humans have escaped the phenomenon of Natural Selection, for the most part. All of us who wear glasses? We should have been culled. All these people developing diabetes from eating too much sugar? Selected against. Asthma? You get the picture.
Your assertion presupposes that those genetic traits are actually inferior and not suitable for continued survival, which is unknowable until evolution has a chance to ferret them out. Poor eyesight could very well be an evolutionary advantage. Many predators have notoriously poor eyesight (for example monitor lizards and cats), but can hear/smell/taste far better which makes them great hunters and excellent candidates for evolutionary survival.
Diabetes? Type 2 diabetes can often go untreated (medically) managed solely by exercise and diet. The abundance of society's processed foods which contain obscene amounts of sugar is the biggest enemy of type 2. So you have a genetic class of people that need to exercise more and eat healthier.
I'm not saying that every disease is actually an advantage, but it's presumptuous of us to believe, from our limited temporal footprint in the history of evolution, that we can tell the difference between an evolutionary advantage and a weakness that should be culled. It frequently takes many thousands of years for natural selection to determine a victor in terms of evolution, and often times species we would consider inferior have prevailed over seemingly superior creatures.
At this point in time, things we might consciously decide to cull from the gene pool with genetic modification may actually be against our own interests. One person says "We fixed his eyes", another person says "But you broke his ears".
Carry a non-driver's license form of ID. Personally, I carry my U.S. passport. Some people think it's strange when I show them my passport and I've got semi-frequent comments that they've never seen someone use a passport as ID.
It's only ever been refused once, at a gas station when I was 22, a store refused to sell cigarettes to me because they said it wasn't a valid form of ID. The pleasure I received from staring ignorance in the face far exceeded any sense of rejection.
Connecticut offers up to $25,000 tax rebate for the cost of installing solar panels.
Until January 1st 2006, some areas of California offered up to $15,000 rebates + 7.5% of the installed system.
Those tax rebates were/are in addition to the $2,000 federal tax rebate, and in addition to property tax exemptions on the cost of the system.
Aside from government subsidies for solar panels, there are private firms that offer additional incentives if there is any remaining cost.
The need to compel people to adopt a solution is not, in itself, an argument that the solution is unnecessary. Applying game theory, even given a dominant strategy consumers may actually choose the weaker strategy because they lack the cognitive level required to understand which strategy is better.
Many consumers will choose what is familiar over what is better, even given a clear-cut advantage. For example, many dial-up users will refuse to switch to a broadband connection, even if the offer has all of the following properties:
This type of decision making can also be observed in solar panel sales. A consumer who can afford a $25,000 solar panel setup and has the government offer a $25,000 subsidy (effectively paying $0 for a lifetime reduction of 80% of their energy bill), will still not have it installed. This behavior is a result of 3 related fallacies. The "Burden of Proof", "Appeal to Tradition", and "Fallacy of Pride".
Burden of Proof - It is much harder for Microsoft to prove Office 97 is inferior to Office 2007 than it is for a user of Office 97 to prove Office 2007 doesn't meet their needs as effectively as Office 97 does. This is because Microsoft does not know the needs of the user in question, only the user does, and therefore the burden of proof is on the person making the assessment.
Appeal to Tradition fallacy - This is what I've always had and it has always worked for me, therefore it must be the dominant strategy.
Fallacy of Pride - People want to believe the initial choice they made was intelligent. Changing strategies would imply that their previous choice was not intelligent. Therefore, the intelligent choice is to not change strategies.
That's just low. Most NRA members are responsible adults who just want the right to bear arms and protect themselves and their families. They're not crazy gun-toting lunatics with hair-trigger rifles and bad tempers.
Hahaha, just kidding, yes they are.First, most of the videos on YouTube where people get shocked and are not disabled are the use of "Stun Guns" not tasers (Even though the videos are labeled as tasers), or they are dry stuns which are considerably weaker than a live stun.
Second the effect of a taser is inconsistent due to uncontrollable variables. Body fat, sodium levels, iron levels, and some people have naturally higher pain tolerances. It's not a fair comparison to say that, you saw someone else resist therefore any other subject should be able to do the same thing.
I agree. People treat projects like they're directly exchangeable on a 1-for-1 basis with a resource of a different kind. Like for every dollar you spend on computers is exactly the same equivalence of food. Unfortunately, diminishing returns comes into play. At a certain point, a $100 laptop provides higher marginal utility than additional food. The overall education level of the country and the accessibility of the nation to internet resources may outweigh the same dollar amount spent on more food, medicine, or some other resource.
Division of labor is important. Just because you spend x number of dollars to train additional medical personnel doesn't mean that instantly those people who have intellect suited for engineering/computer science will be able to transition to medicine because you've given it additional funding.
I've got a friend who's a cheater. Most recently the game he is cheating at is Rakion. But that's not the first or last game he's going to cheat at. He starts every game the same, playing legitimately for a couple weeks, then he starts talking about people he notices cheating, at first he takes screenshots and reports the cheaters, but he's impatient. If the people he reports aren't punished immediately he gets mad and thinks the company doesn't care about the game. [That's the point where I can see he's getting ready to do it himself]
About two weeks into playing, he starts sending private messages to cheaters and gets to be acquaintances with them. A couple more days go by and he's running a cheat himself. He'll justify it by saying the company doesn't care anyway because they don't stop cheaters (implying the company tacitly approves of his behavior). A week or two later he'll get caught and dealt some kind of punishment. If it's not a complete ban he'll stop cheating for a little while, but then cheaters who get away with it bother him more than ever, he goes on this hypocritical/psychotic rampage reporting cheaters by the dozen, essentially trying to harass the company into dealing with cheaters. That lasts for about a week before he starts cheating again, and gets another punishment. At that point, he thinks he's smarter than the game company, so he'll find little ways to cheat, small exploits that he thinks will go unnoticed. Instead of obvious cheats, he tries adjusting game properties by small values he thinks no one will notice. For example, instead of cheating to gain infinite health, he boosts his health by 5%-10%. That goes on for maybe another month until the company bans him permanently.
At that point he gets self-righteous and rants about the following topics in no specific order:
It's not any specific game, it's every game he plays, the same cycle. I try to keep him honest, inspire him to take pleasure in normal gaming behavior, but he can't. He's supernaturally compelled to cheat. It's disappointing because I don't get to play games with him that we could enjoy together. It's always fun for the first couple of weeks, and I'm always thoroughly convinced that he's really not going to cheat this time, but after he breaks into the cheating cycle I distance my play from him because I don't want to play with or against someone I know is cheating, and I don't want my accounts to become associated with his in the eyes of the GMs (which has happened on more than one occasion).
One day, I actually got a phone call from a GM that wanted to know how I knew him and wanted to know how he convinced me to open an account for him after he got banned. This wasn't the first time he was banned, he had received a lifetime ban from this game 5 or 6 times, but he always finds ways to get someone to let them use their account. The GM discovered that he was playing on my account because my friend told one of his game acquaintances who he was. He revels in infamy. He can't play a game for the game's sake, he needs people to know who he is. Even if it means that his best friend's account is in jeopardy, he'd rather screw his friend over than risk having people in a game not know how clever he is in circumventing the system. Before I gave him access to a slot on my account, I pleaded with him to just play the game and not tell anyone who he was