This kinda troll always cracks me up, because it's about a 50-50 chance as to whether my fiancee or I asks the other to play Unreal Tournament or Diablo II. =P
Gentlemen, there are great-looking geek girls out there.
So if someone pays $10-$40/mo on anything from Everquest to ESPN Fantasy Football, they still have lost nothing of value when someone maliciously AND OUTSIDE THE CONTEXT OF THE GAME messes with it?
I think you're TRYING to miss the point. We're not talking about people who steal cars in GTA, or wreck them...or people who kill other players on MMORPGs that allow them. We're talking about people who break the system in ways that adversely affect other players.
Killing my character in Everquest is fine. Breaking into the database of an everquest server and deleting my stuff is (and should be) actionable, and is what we're discussing.
Re:Before the "it's just a game, losers" start up
on
Law and Virtual Worlds
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How about all the jocks/frat boys (including my own frat brothers) who make fun of me for playing video games, then spend all their free time and cash on televised sports and fantasy {foot|base|basket}ball leagues? What part of reality are they interacting with? =P
Misconception alert! It was not designed to slow you down. It was designed so that you rarely typed two adjacent keys in a row--which is what caused jams, not typing speed.
Empirical evidence suggests Dvorak keyboards are no faster than Sholes keyboards (and no slower, either!) given equal training.
Well, you'll note my phrasing...if the place is smart enough to do regular incremental backups of the gamestate, you really shouldn't lose any more than a day of playtime to acts of God or l33t crackers. Here's your $0.50 in damages, have a good day. =)
OTOH, the cracker might see $0.50 x 5,000 to 25,000 (players) disappear out of his pocket, in addition to criminal penalties. Personally, I think that's the way to do it--you don't really give people cash for being obsessive about a game and having it ruined for a day, but the people trying to compromise other people's systems get it in the shorts (as they well should).
Eh, I'm not sure we need any new legalese to deal with this. If you crack a system, you can be liable if that system belongs to someone else. This could easily be construed to include server-side cheats in addition to the time-honored tactic of rooting the server and changing the database (which I had been known to do in Phantasia and a few MUDs/BBSs back in the early '90s, sad to say.)
Why complicate matters further?
Further, damages (in terms of $$$) are easy to calculate...how many hours/months/billable time increments did it take a person to achieve what was destroyed? How much can be got back? Total it out, it's simple math. Perhaps not enough compensation for some basement loser who plays such things 80+ hrs/wk (like my roommate =P), but I think those folks are in the very small minority anyway.
About 75% of your post is FUD. Having been in Israel for a year when in college, there wasn't any such law restricting citizenship to Jews as of 1998. Maybe that's changed?
I know for a fact that when the first few Arab vs. Israel wars happened in the 1960s, the Israeli government made it expressly clear that any Arab who'd fled the country was allowed back, could have their land back, no questions asked as long as they behaved like citizens. Most of the refugees didn't return due to political pressure (mainly from Jordan and Syria) and propoganda about Jewish trickery. In some cases, Jordanian troops forcibly prevented Palestinian Arabs from returning to Israel.
I know this because I know a non-Jewish Arab (Druses, actually) who was an exchange student at my college. He was from central Israel, and his family had never had any problems with discrimination, religious, ethnically, or otherwise (which was a big change for his parents, who immigrated from Syria in the late 60s).
You are absolutely right about "Jew" being an ethnic group and not a racial group. Most Jews and most Arabs are (racially speaking) Semetic, IIRC, although it's getting harder and harder to talk about "most Jews" in any meaningful way.
Well, at some point when someone provides me a study which shows these "proven" negative effects, I'll be quite happy to read it. So far, every study I've heard of has been inconclusive or on the side of the "Games don't cause anything".
I will happily acknowledge that some people can be driven over the edge by stimuli--Ted Bundy's claims that the availability of/his addiction to porn was a major factor in his crimes, etc. However, I know from experience (having worked as a bouncer in college) that despite playing loads of violent video games, I still was very sensitive to real-life violence--I don't like it, I have never liked it, and yet I can play Postal II and laugh my ass off.
I'm not saying everyone's like me, either. But you have three basic choices:
Ban violent videogames (and porn, and alcohol, etc) on the grounds that some small % of people are affected by them enough to make them killers.
Let the situation stand as it is, with reasonable age controls and such, and preserve the freedom of the majority who are fully capable of handling their {games|pr0n|liquor}.
Sell the stuff, but require psychiatric exams to prove you're not likely to be unduly affected by {games|pr0n|liquor}.
If you pick #1 or #3, where do you draw the line? With violent games? With porn? With violent movies? How violent? How about violent music?
As opposed to letting doctors (most of whom are not "rich" by any means) continue to go on paying more for malpractice insurance per month than I make in my entire monthly paycheck?
I know plenty of doctors (the ones I patronize) who'd drop their fees quite a bit if they didn't have the malpractice-insurance monkey on their back.
If I had mod points, I'd give you the troll mod you're obviously craving. Gratz on getting so many people to feed you despite "Strawlman" and other minor idiocities--which are, of course, straight out of the handbook. =P
> > In reality, there is no risk posed by creating artificial black holes
> Oh, and this ship will not sink.
Jeez. There is nothing magical about a black hole that makes it different from every other massive body until you cross its event horizon. A black hole made of two protons colliding has less mass (and less gravitational pull) than a goddamn helium atom.
Why is that concept so hard to grasp for people here?
Well, duh. The energy released increases slightly because the hole's radius is dropping, but it also decreases because there's less mass in the hole to radiate. So shutting off the feed causes the hole to dissipate as per the Hawking Effect.
I think the reason that more people are willing to point directly to buddhism as opposed to religion in general in this sort of thing, despite the bible passages you quote, is due to two factors:
Buddhism actively encourages the practice of meditation and contemplation, which (it seems to me) would have a larger effect on the calmness of an individual than the tenets of a religion in general. I rarely see a similar emphasis on daily meditation and contemplation in Christian churches.
Anecdotally, but relevant is the fact that most people who are known to be Buddhist tend to rather closely follow Buddhist ideals--when the average American thinks of Buddhism, he thinks of monks and maybe a few actors. Wheras the tendency is to assume that the average greedy overstressed Westerner is "Christian" of some flavor, when in reality they're not really practicing much of anything except for the fact they go to church every so often.
I dunno if integrity has as much to do with it...I mean, had he been comparing two memory types, perhaps, but since the test was on a single hardware configuration, how does it impunge his integrity to thank the hardware provider in a semi-advertising way? Nowhere else does he make any claims good or bad about the Crucial RAM itself that I saw.
Perhaps if you'd paid attention in those literature classes you dismiss, you'd have noted that I said "Any creative work is going to have the potential for underlying deeper meanings." My statement was not absolute, despite your attempt to treat it as such.
In general, no one cares about your flames until you earn some credibility. As it stands, all you've done is prove yourself incapable of basic reading comprehension.
BTW, which is worse, a geeky useless hobby or flaming said hobbies as a hobby in and of itself?
As the AC said, it's fundamentally a question of intent. If I scan port 80 across the network, I could be very easily *gasp* searching for webservers. Y'know, because people put up webservers to be viewed.
If I'm scanning for SubSeven, it's pretty much a sure thing I'm being evil. To a limited extent, that's also true of just about every port other than webservers or SMB shares.
But why scream about someone who ONLY scans ports normally associated with publically accessible resources?
I might be feeding the trolls here, but since some reasonable people have said variants on this theme, let's try a variant or two...
"If you are trying to learn from a book designed for entertainment, then..."
Holy crap! There goes literature. Whoops, so much for high school english classes reading the classics.
"If you are trying to learn from a piece of music designed for entertainment, then..."
Well, hell. I guess I can't learn anything about musical styles and chording from anything other than example pieces specifically designed for music theory classes.
Any creative work is going to have the potential for underlying deeper meanings. And if you enjoy finding them, more power to yah. If you don't, and just like being spoon-fed, that's fine too. But quit flaming the people who like a bit of depth, even if they have to make it themselves.
Just based on my own experiences, I would have to agree that there's nothing inherently wrong with MMORPGs aside from being yet another thing for addictive personalities to latch on to.
Case in point--my college roommate and I both played the same MUD for three years. We leveled together, formed clans together, all that stuff. Last year, when I graduated and had money to do other things, I stopped. He, OTOH, can't even seem to hold down a job--his most successful job to date was working nights at the mail desk where he basically got paid to mud for 8 hrs. Once they killed 'net access for worker drones, he quit and stayed home to mud all night.
Slashdot Mirror
This kinda troll always cracks me up, because it's about a 50-50 chance as to whether my fiancee or I asks the other to play Unreal Tournament or Diablo II. =P
Gentlemen, there are great-looking geek girls out there.
So if someone pays $10-$40/mo on anything from Everquest to ESPN Fantasy Football, they still have lost nothing of value when someone maliciously AND OUTSIDE THE CONTEXT OF THE GAME messes with it?
I think you're TRYING to miss the point. We're not talking about people who steal cars in GTA, or wreck them...or people who kill other players on MMORPGs that allow them. We're talking about people who break the system in ways that adversely affect other players.
Killing my character in Everquest is fine. Breaking into the database of an everquest server and deleting my stuff is (and should be) actionable, and is what we're discussing.
How about all the jocks/frat boys (including my own frat brothers) who make fun of me for playing video games, then spend all their free time and cash on televised sports and fantasy {foot|base|basket}ball leagues? What part of reality are they interacting with? =P
Misconception alert!
It was not designed to slow you down. It was designed so that you rarely typed two adjacent keys in a row--which is what caused jams, not typing speed.
Empirical evidence suggests Dvorak keyboards are no faster than Sholes keyboards (and no slower, either!) given equal training.
Well, you'll note my phrasing...if the place is smart enough to do regular incremental backups of the gamestate, you really shouldn't lose any more than a day of playtime to acts of God or l33t crackers. Here's your $0.50 in damages, have a good day. =)
OTOH, the cracker might see $0.50 x 5,000 to 25,000 (players) disappear out of his pocket, in addition to criminal penalties. Personally, I think that's the way to do it--you don't really give people cash for being obsessive about a game and having it ruined for a day, but the people trying to compromise other people's systems get it in the shorts (as they well should).
Eh, I'm not sure we need any new legalese to deal with this. If you crack a system, you can be liable if that system belongs to someone else. This could easily be construed to include server-side cheats in addition to the time-honored tactic of rooting the server and changing the database (which I had been known to do in Phantasia and a few MUDs/BBSs back in the early '90s, sad to say.)
Why complicate matters further?
Further, damages (in terms of $$$) are easy to calculate...how many hours/months/billable time increments did it take a person to achieve what was destroyed? How much can be got back? Total it out, it's simple math. Perhaps not enough compensation for some basement loser who plays such things 80+ hrs/wk (like my roommate =P), but I think those folks are in the very small minority anyway.
About 75% of your post is FUD.
Having been in Israel for a year when in college, there wasn't any such law restricting citizenship to Jews as of 1998. Maybe that's changed?
I know for a fact that when the first few Arab vs. Israel wars happened in the 1960s, the Israeli government made it expressly clear that any Arab who'd fled the country was allowed back, could have their land back, no questions asked as long as they behaved like citizens.
Most of the refugees didn't return due to political pressure (mainly from Jordan and Syria) and propoganda about Jewish trickery. In some cases, Jordanian troops forcibly prevented Palestinian Arabs from returning to Israel.
I know this because I know a non-Jewish Arab (Druses, actually) who was an exchange student at my college. He was from central Israel, and his family had never had any problems with discrimination, religious, ethnically, or otherwise (which was a big change for his parents, who immigrated from Syria in the late 60s).
You are absolutely right about "Jew" being an ethnic group and not a racial group. Most Jews and most Arabs are (racially speaking) Semetic, IIRC, although it's getting harder and harder to talk about "most Jews" in any meaningful way.
I will happily acknowledge that some people can be driven over the edge by stimuli--Ted Bundy's claims that the availability of/his addiction to porn was a major factor in his crimes, etc. However, I know from experience (having worked as a bouncer in college) that despite playing loads of violent video games, I still was very sensitive to real-life violence--I don't like it, I have never liked it, and yet I can play Postal II and laugh my ass off.
I'm not saying everyone's like me, either. But you have three basic choices:
If you pick #1 or #3, where do you draw the line? With violent games? With porn? With violent movies? How violent? How about violent music?
Slippery slope potential.
As opposed to letting doctors (most of whom are not "rich" by any means) continue to go on paying more for malpractice insurance per month than I make in my entire monthly paycheck?
I know plenty of doctors (the ones I patronize) who'd drop their fees quite a bit if they didn't have the malpractice-insurance monkey on their back.
If I had mod points, I'd give you the troll mod you're obviously craving. Gratz on getting so many people to feed you despite "Strawlman" and other minor idiocities--which are, of course, straight out of the handbook. =P
> > In reality, there is no risk posed by creating artificial black holes
> Oh, and this ship will not sink.
Jeez. There is nothing magical about a black hole that makes it different from every other massive body until you cross its event horizon. A black hole made of two protons colliding has less mass (and less gravitational pull) than a goddamn helium atom.
Why is that concept so hard to grasp for people here?
Well, duh. The energy released increases slightly because the hole's radius is dropping, but it also decreases because there's less mass in the hole to radiate. So shutting off the feed causes the hole to dissipate as per the Hawking Effect.
You can't be serious. Even my dad's 2k1 Chevy Suburban gets 21mpg highway anymore.
Funny how I'm a geek and I met my fiancee doing geeky things.
Geekishness is not a male-only or even male-dominated thing anymore.
I mean, sure, if you want to date a shallow Aberzombie&Bitch type (ooh, I'm funny =P), then get into bodybuilding and go to the bars.
Note the previous sentence does not excuse you being out of shape, because a lardass is a lardass, geek or not. =P
The devil is in the details--namely, the detail that GPL forces information to stay free, where conventional copyright does not.
It worked for Ivory. ...I just made a soap joke on slashdot. Go me.
I dunno if integrity has as much to do with it...I mean, had he been comparing two memory types, perhaps, but since the test was on a single hardware configuration, how does it impunge his integrity to thank the hardware provider in a semi-advertising way? Nowhere else does he make any claims good or bad about the Crucial RAM itself that I saw.
Perhaps if you'd paid attention in those literature classes you dismiss, you'd have noted that I said
"Any creative work is going to have the potential for underlying deeper meanings."
My statement was not absolute, despite your attempt to treat it as such.
In general, no one cares about your flames until you earn some credibility. As it stands, all you've done is prove yourself incapable of basic reading comprehension.
BTW, which is worse, a geeky useless hobby or flaming said hobbies as a hobby in and of itself?
As the AC said, it's fundamentally a question of intent.
If I scan port 80 across the network, I could be very easily *gasp* searching for webservers. Y'know, because people put up webservers to be viewed.
If I'm scanning for SubSeven, it's pretty much a sure thing I'm being evil. To a limited extent, that's also true of just about every port other than webservers or SMB shares.
But why scream about someone who ONLY scans ports normally associated with publically accessible resources?
I might be feeding the trolls here, but since some reasonable people have said variants on this theme, let's try a variant or two...
"If you are trying to learn from a book designed for entertainment, then..."
Holy crap! There goes literature. Whoops, so much for high school english classes reading the classics.
"If you are trying to learn from a piece of music designed for entertainment, then..."
Well, hell. I guess I can't learn anything about musical styles and chording from anything other than example pieces specifically designed for music theory classes.
Any creative work is going to have the potential for underlying deeper meanings. And if you enjoy finding them, more power to yah. If you don't, and just like being spoon-fed, that's fine too. But quit flaming the people who like a bit of depth, even if they have to make it themselves.
...of slashdotters and unix/linux users with fiancees/spouses. =P
Especially if said fiancee/spouse requests Linux on her computer after seeing you use it.
I suppose it was important to me (At the time) that I be clearly not performing anything even remotely like an attack.
Of course, nowadays I WOULD use a SYN scan. =P
Just based on my own experiences, I would have to agree that there's nothing inherently wrong with MMORPGs aside from being yet another thing for addictive personalities to latch on to.
Case in point--my college roommate and I both played the same MUD for three years. We leveled together, formed clans together, all that stuff. Last year, when I graduated and had money to do other things, I stopped. He, OTOH, can't even seem to hold down a job--his most successful job to date was working nights at the mail desk where he basically got paid to mud for 8 hrs. Once they killed 'net access for worker drones, he quit and stayed home to mud all night.
Umm...this assumes you have a decent x-configuration, but Ctrl-Alt-Plus and Ctrl-Alt-Minus switch resolutions/color depths on MY linux box.
I've been able to hand-roll X configs to do it since 1996 at least, although I'd have to check to see if any distros do it out of the box.