What is broken in the U.S. legal system is that in spite of the fact it comes from the UK common law system (so much that English common law prior to 1776 is still considered legally admissible in most American court rooms.... assuming subsequent precedence and legislation hasn't overturned that precedence), there is a group of judges who think the entire concept of common law can be thrown out entirely and that opinions can be made based upon whimsy and more often than not political considerations. That also gets to conflicting precedence that can basically provide a white wash of allowing a judge to be as arbitrary as they care in some situations.
There is also the fly in the ointment of some lawyers who simply didn't do their homework, and judges that refuse to do that homework for those lawyers. In situations like that, the lawyers who bother looking up the law usually win. There are a huge number of incompetent lawyers currently practicing and no real way to clean them out of the system either. Indeed I'd dare say that this particular situation by Comcast was caused by either a paralegal that went too far or a lawyer who simply didn't care to read up on the laws involved. Either way, it was gross incompetence... and sometimes even incompetent idiots win judicial judgements.
The problem with ignoring a threat like this is that you really don't know what the outcome is, no matter how righteous you think you are in terms of actually following the law and believing that you have done absolutely nothing wrong.... even if you go so far as to contact lawyers and get an opinion from lawyers you have hired and they assert you have done nothing wrong. You are depending on the whims and fancies of judges or potentially even juries or at the very least an expensive legal proceeding that can suck all of the money out of your company if you fail to fall over and give in to the threat.
The threat that the group needed to have the legal mess cleaned up in 24 hours was even harsher, and I suspect could have been actionable in a legal sense as well (I hope it was just a knee jerk response). None the less, just because the ISP was in the wrong doesn't stop them from being a jerk either.
Again, I think you mistaken the "far left" and "anarachists" as the same thing. They really aren't. I would define "far left" as those who espouse Communism and desire a big government welfare state, and of course Fascists (or variations of that) who want a big government that sponsors large monopoles for various sectors of the economy that are quasi government agencies in themselves even if they make a profit from their products.
This is a far oversimplified version of things, but I suggest there are two wings of libertarianism: those who emphasize the 2nd Amendment and those who emphasize legalizing marijuana. They mostly support each other's overall goals though and if you ask one group or the other they think the government needs to simply stay out of their lives, even though both groups often are "converts" from more traditional "conservative" or "liberal" political groups.
I'll also point out that sadly in the U.S. Congress, most of those who hold office are clearly statists and not libertarians. It is about time they get labeled as such and the voters be made aware of that fact.
That is a fair point. It is also ignored in most history books that blacks fought back against the KKK and ended up killing more than a few of them, where technically the racial war that happened in the deep south took out thousands of lives... both black and white. The numbers involved rank with some of the great battles of the U.S. Civil War, but happened just a few at a time.
One interesting thing about the KKK though is that it was also deeply rooted into the political culture of the areas where it prevailed, with even members of the U.S. Supreme Court openly proclaiming membership in the organization. It is funny to see some modern day politicians run away from their roots in that organization (like Robert Byrd in particular but others too).
One other difference is that the KKK was not explicitly trying to overthrow or even hope for the destruction of the U.S. government. There have been other domestic terrorist groups that have done that as an explicit goal though.
Of course the problem with filing a lawsuit against a government agency is that they can claim sovereign immunity, thus you get the lawsuit thrown out without even so much as a hearing much less being able to spend time before a judge at all.
It really is a stupid thing, where you need to beg and ask the government for permission to sue the government. From time to time the government allows you to do that, but it becomes a joke as the government really doesn't need to follow its own rules, much less common sense.
Prior to World War II, the Post Office Department was the largest federal agency by far, which is why I bothered to include it. Furthermore, the Postmaster General was a cabinet level officer which reported directly to the President until the Postal Service was created as a quasi-government agency like it exists today. Note I wasn't trying to be misleading by quoting just the size of the post office, but rather note that basically the Post Office Department was for all intents and purposes what you could call nearly the entire federal government with a few various appendages like the U.S. Navy and Army who made up the remainder of the government and of course a few other left overs. Even during the administration of FDR, the U.S. Army totaled less than 30,000 soldiers and legislation was even drafted at the time (and even got a floor vote) to completely eliminate it altogether as it was felt an unnecessary expense of American taxpayers and that the National Guard could cover any real security needs at the time with maybe a very small contingent of generals to command the national army in times of crises.
The federal government started to balloon under the Herbert Hoover administration, and became the bloated mess we know today under the FDR administration and not really cut back except under the JFK administration (or at least that was a professed goal of JFK had he lived to a 2nd term) and the Truman administration, where people still remembered the much smaller federal government. World War II grew the U.S. military from the very small number that existed prior to that war to an organization of several million. Nobody since has really tried cut those numbers.
My point is that the federal government was very small at one time, and that it was a large republic with 48 states and not just a loose newly free group of colonies like is sometimes portrayed by people who say the federal government simply must be this size in order to govern effectively. Noting numbers since 1962 is well past when the damage was done.
Of course the UK has a tradition of internal rebellion and forcing the government into concessions that generally have resulted in greater freedoms among its people (with a few setbacks along the way).
Stuff like this used to be mainly done on a local level, where you could always "vote with your feet" and go elsewhere if you didn't like the attitude of a particular county sheriff towards your family (whatever skin color or ethnicity you might have). Quite a few people did pack up and leave, moving from one area to another from time to time.
What is different today is that it is the federal government that is doing stuff like this, where as before they were such a small part of American life that they couldn't do anything like what is happening today. It wasn't that long ago (still in the 20th Century) when the total number of federal employees, including the military and the post office (by far the largest department at the time) numbered just over 100,000 people in a republic of over 200 million. America was governed very well at the time too.
If you want to leave America, where do you go? Edward Snowden has gone to Russia, but is that a realistic option?
Israel had a real persistent terrorist problem with at one point daily bombings in its cities. Ditto for Norther Ireland. Nothing like that has remotely happened in the United States.
If anything, I'd say that Al Qaeda has been completely ineffective and unable to carry on operations that even the Symbionese Liberation Army was able to accomplish (an otherwise no-name group of idiots who managed to pull off a couple of stupid "terrorist" operations prior to 9/11 in the USA). The only place that Al Qaeda seems capable of destroying is Iraq and Afghanistan... mainly killing their own supporters for the most part (and makes you wonder why they have support?)
Because there are other dimensions of political philosophies. Both "conservatives" as well as "liberals" can be strong statists.... people who think the government should get as large as possible and the only distinction is where that money ought to be spent. Others (both "left" and "right") want to push back and tear down the size of government.
There are other dimensions of political thought as well, which is why the distinction is just silly as it was based upon the seating arrangements of the French Parliament in the 19th Century. Don't you think a few new political ideas have been developed over the past century alone?
It could just be a copy of Wikipedia. We won't know what is in that file until after the key is released.
While it would be interesting if it was transcripts of Obama's conversations on September 11th, 2012 in the Oval Office and data dumps from the Pentagon on that day as well (look up the date if you don't know what I'm talking about), there is no proof that the data file means anything at all. As such, it really could just be a publicity stunt, even though the data file is real.
Let's hope that the insurance file really is something worth reading and can't be found anywhere else.
With the drives destroyed, and the leaks plugged, we can all get back to our normal lives under the new heightened levels of paranoia.
Of course the drives were mirrored all over the internet, so by destroying the data on the drives nothing was really accomplished other than an indirect fine charged to the Guardian.... who needed to replace this equipment at their expense so all of that data can be put upon new equipment.
Really, it didn't accomplish anything at all other than making some low level bureaucrat think they accomplished a big deal that ultimately meant nothing at all.
I doubt it was a lack of ideas on what to do with the game. The problem was that almost everything he did was essentially a re-creation of Minecraft, simply set in space. Trying to get away from Minecraft, voxels, and stuff like the Minecraft work bench just proved to be too hard to get away from, particular when his goal was for a similar kind of open-ended game that players could build stuff in.
Supposedly he worked on a spacecraft interior design tool (different from the block placement tool he worked on earlier), and the physics engine in the demo looked pretty good. Some parts were clearly superior to anything done in Minecraft.
It will be interesting to see if anything happens with Trillek. At the moment it is a whole lot of talk and bruised egos with not much code, but I'm hoping that changes. They are still arguing about what compilers are going to be used, and almost universally they are moving away from Java.
As a fan community which attracted a whole bunch of programmers, it isn't surprising that they are picking up their tools and making the game they wanted to play in the first place. I guess that will be a sort of legacy even if Notch is not directly involved. It would be funny as hell if Notch used a pseudonym and joined the community helping to contribute a little bit of code but staying low key otherwise.
I disagree. I think rather than resorting to censorship and/or scrapping freedom of speech (Don't bother with fire in a crowded theater analogies; I disagree with that sort of logic too.), we should just accept that casualties sometimes happen. I don't think molesting people at airports is a valid response to terrorism, and I would think that way even if the TSA were effective.
I really hope we are passing each other in terms of what we are talking about here.
This is about people being jackasses and saying extremely mean things, acting like jerks, and being classic trolls on top of making death threats here. This has nothing to do with "free speech" and sure as hell isn't censorship. This is taking people who are acting like a bunch of criminals because they are criminals and violating ethical standards that would not be tolerated at all if you were standing face to face with them.
I still can't possibly believe you support having people die because of your actions, or that you wouldn't lift a finger to try to prevent their death. Seriously, you have got to be one of the most vile souls I can possibly imagine just to think this kind of thing is remotely acceptable.
The choice here is to behave yourself and actually realize that what you type on a forum or in a game might actually have some real-world consequences, where real people can be hurt and hurt profoundly.
WAKE UP AND SEE WHAT YOU ARE TYPING!
Geez, I'm not supporting death squads or for even broad monitoring of network activity. I am asking that if somebody crosses the threshold of being a jackass that such a person can be punished for their actions. Freedom of speech doesn't give you the freedom to hurt people, say things that are patently false, and to besmirch the reputation of another person. This doesn't require new laws to be passed, but rather to have existing laws be enforced in spite of the fact it is an on-line environment.
Depending on who you talk to, HAARP is either the U.S. government's attempt to control the global climate and take over the world, is under the control of the Bavarian Illuminati (or the Knights Templar, Masons, Greys, Reptilians, or other sort of conspiracy theory), or it is a research site that is developing RADAR technologies and other radio-frequency based concepts that can be used to protect America from foreign threats and is just another military installation. Perhaps it is just an ordinary "big science" research post doing even more benign and peaceful things.
It is also the butt of a great many jokes from those who've heard the worst of the conspiracy theories to want to puke.
In other words, your statement previously made is simply invalid. I'll also point out that putting in a fake or unmonitored e-mail address can land you in a huge pile of legal trouble when you are "notified" about stuff that really is important (like a court summons or some other legal notice) and you fail to pay attention.
In short, a person following your advise here would just be screwed.
You can make the contact information be a snail-mail address or have the person make some kind of extra hard step to contact you (thus dodging the legal contact requirements) and being a heartless bastard about what anybody else thinks of what you are doing is certainly legally OK. Regardless, you should be aware of what your customers think of you and your products, otherwise you will eventually go out of business or drift into irrelevancy.
If you are doing this for fun and giggles, eventually you will get tired of whatever it is that you are doing and move on, in which case there might as well not even be a fan community for you to worry about. They will just go about their business and copy all of your stuff, just like what happened to Infiniminer.
Heck, there have been people who have been killed or at least forced (from their perspective) into suicide.
The minuscule minority, you mean?
If ANYBODY commits suicide as a result of player actions, I think that is far too much. What kind of callous individual are you to think that it is acceptable to be promoting somebody else's death?
Geez, you've got to be one cold hearted bastard to be thinking this is something remotely acceptable. This kind of cyber bulling can and should be criminally prosecuted with manslaughter charges pressed against those who participate in this kind of action. Just because "it was a game" doesn't cut it at all.
Books are likely to be a very bad example, as there certainly are for some authors a huge fan base. Just look at the community that surrounds JK Rowling with regards to the Harry Potter series for a contemporary example. I could even mention CS Lewis with the Chronicles of Narnia (where fans did have some significant input on the story direction) and L. Frank Baum with the "Oz" series where fan mail kept pushing him into writing more and more stories in the series.
Robert Heinlein got so fed up with his fan base that he ended up moving out to the middle of nowhere to explicitly get away from the fans.... and they still tracked him down and set up permanent encampments near his house that needed to be regularly cleaned out by local law enforcement agents. Some of the fans of Heinlein got so fanatical that they literally considered him either the manifestation of God himself or at least a messianic figure close enough that it didn't matter. It has been suggested that perhaps L. Ron Hubbard got some ideas from that experience of Heinlein when setting up.... you figure the rest.
As for movies, I suppose you've never been to a Star Trek convention? The 501st Legion seems to push things to an interesting extreme where those fans certainly are very demanding with the filmmakers. What about the "Hans shot first" controversy?
I really think this is something that simply comes from mass distributed artwork in general. Serial artwork (books, radio serials, movies, computer games) in particular where the fans invest time (whole heaps of time) and money into the art sometimes expect something back and certainly don't like to see a "change in vision".
This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, and I'm glad that some people are talking about it. This shouldn't imply you need to be paranoid when you are in that situation, but to put your head in a hole and pretend these issues are not worthy of even thinking about them or doing some advanced planning to avoid some of the problems which come from fan/developer interactions is also just as silly.
Where do you draw the line of simple banter and what becomes something serious to bring in the real life law enforcement agents to get involved? I've certainly had people on-line make death threats to me.... both saying they hated my personna and avatar where they would lay in wait on PVP worlds or do other things to really screw up my account.... as well as some where I really did get worried that they would do something in real life to me or my family.
In one case, I did call up a law enforcement agent and they agreed with me after seeing the conversation (I kept a screen shot of what was written) that it was enough to start a formal investigation. Stuff like that happens.
Heck, there have been people who have been killed or at least forced (from their perspective) into suicide. When that happens, those who want to ban these games gain moral authority and certainly political capital to shut stuff like these games down.
Part of good game development business practice is to NEVER have developers talking directly to fans or viceversa. There should be middlemen who do that, namely community coordinators, moderators and such.
The problem is if you are a new independent start-up that is essentially a one-man show. I would like to point out the experience of Marcus "Notch" Persson who literally did everything in the company at first from writing the HTML for the website, the back end server work, and the actual game development. Yes, now he has the money to hire people to do all of that stuff, but he was at least at first doing everything on his own.
There are other similar very small game development companies I've interacted with that are in a similar position... even with very popular games. Even using the example of Notch those developers start out by interacting with just a small number of die hard fans, but sometimes either they strike gold or some sort of "magic" happens where whatever they produce becomes extremely popular in spite of their small size. They love the interaction with fans, but eventually get real tired of all of the attention.
The question here really is how do you deal with fans in a company where you are so small that you simply must wear multiple hats? You might be able to enlist some volunteers from the fan base, such as what Jimmy Wales ended up doing with Wikipedia in a mostly volunteer effort including some substantial software development and server operations. Still, even those volunteers have limits and eventually you need at least some people who are paid for what they are doing. If you have a smash hit, it becomes even harder as sometimes the growth of the fan base gets ahead of any effort to get community managers (especially paid ones) in position to deal with them.
It is a nice idea in concept, and when a game development company is in a position to separate the fans (heck, any sort of direct customer interaction for any kind of software development) from the developers it is a good thing. I was a software developer on some major software projects, and thank goodness I only provided tertiary support backing up other customer support representatives. Even then, I often made some pretty awful mistakes when I ended up needing to deal directly with customers.... in spite of the fact I gained a reputation of almost always solving the problems involved (hence why I got many of those kind of support calls). Larger and well established companies certainly should put up some sort of barrier between the developers and the fans.
Slashdot Mirror
What is broken in the U.S. legal system is that in spite of the fact it comes from the UK common law system (so much that English common law prior to 1776 is still considered legally admissible in most American court rooms.... assuming subsequent precedence and legislation hasn't overturned that precedence), there is a group of judges who think the entire concept of common law can be thrown out entirely and that opinions can be made based upon whimsy and more often than not political considerations. That also gets to conflicting precedence that can basically provide a white wash of allowing a judge to be as arbitrary as they care in some situations.
There is also the fly in the ointment of some lawyers who simply didn't do their homework, and judges that refuse to do that homework for those lawyers. In situations like that, the lawyers who bother looking up the law usually win. There are a huge number of incompetent lawyers currently practicing and no real way to clean them out of the system either. Indeed I'd dare say that this particular situation by Comcast was caused by either a paralegal that went too far or a lawyer who simply didn't care to read up on the laws involved. Either way, it was gross incompetence... and sometimes even incompetent idiots win judicial judgements.
Comcast did come groveling back and apologized for sending the C&D notice, informing Torrent Freak that they should disregard the notice.
At least somebody got smart.
The problem with ignoring a threat like this is that you really don't know what the outcome is, no matter how righteous you think you are in terms of actually following the law and believing that you have done absolutely nothing wrong.... even if you go so far as to contact lawyers and get an opinion from lawyers you have hired and they assert you have done nothing wrong. You are depending on the whims and fancies of judges or potentially even juries or at the very least an expensive legal proceeding that can suck all of the money out of your company if you fail to fall over and give in to the threat.
The threat that the group needed to have the legal mess cleaned up in 24 hours was even harsher, and I suspect could have been actionable in a legal sense as well (I hope it was just a knee jerk response). None the less, just because the ISP was in the wrong doesn't stop them from being a jerk either.
Again, I think you mistaken the "far left" and "anarachists" as the same thing. They really aren't. I would define "far left" as those who espouse Communism and desire a big government welfare state, and of course Fascists (or variations of that) who want a big government that sponsors large monopoles for various sectors of the economy that are quasi government agencies in themselves even if they make a profit from their products.
This is a far oversimplified version of things, but I suggest there are two wings of libertarianism: those who emphasize the 2nd Amendment and those who emphasize legalizing marijuana. They mostly support each other's overall goals though and if you ask one group or the other they think the government needs to simply stay out of their lives, even though both groups often are "converts" from more traditional "conservative" or "liberal" political groups.
I'll also point out that sadly in the U.S. Congress, most of those who hold office are clearly statists and not libertarians. It is about time they get labeled as such and the voters be made aware of that fact.
That is a fair point. It is also ignored in most history books that blacks fought back against the KKK and ended up killing more than a few of them, where technically the racial war that happened in the deep south took out thousands of lives... both black and white. The numbers involved rank with some of the great battles of the U.S. Civil War, but happened just a few at a time.
One interesting thing about the KKK though is that it was also deeply rooted into the political culture of the areas where it prevailed, with even members of the U.S. Supreme Court openly proclaiming membership in the organization. It is funny to see some modern day politicians run away from their roots in that organization (like Robert Byrd in particular but others too).
One other difference is that the KKK was not explicitly trying to overthrow or even hope for the destruction of the U.S. government. There have been other domestic terrorist groups that have done that as an explicit goal though.
Of course the problem with filing a lawsuit against a government agency is that they can claim sovereign immunity, thus you get the lawsuit thrown out without even so much as a hearing much less being able to spend time before a judge at all.
It really is a stupid thing, where you need to beg and ask the government for permission to sue the government. From time to time the government allows you to do that, but it becomes a joke as the government really doesn't need to follow its own rules, much less common sense.
Prior to World War II, the Post Office Department was the largest federal agency by far, which is why I bothered to include it. Furthermore, the Postmaster General was a cabinet level officer which reported directly to the President until the Postal Service was created as a quasi-government agency like it exists today. Note I wasn't trying to be misleading by quoting just the size of the post office, but rather note that basically the Post Office Department was for all intents and purposes what you could call nearly the entire federal government with a few various appendages like the U.S. Navy and Army who made up the remainder of the government and of course a few other left overs. Even during the administration of FDR, the U.S. Army totaled less than 30,000 soldiers and legislation was even drafted at the time (and even got a floor vote) to completely eliminate it altogether as it was felt an unnecessary expense of American taxpayers and that the National Guard could cover any real security needs at the time with maybe a very small contingent of generals to command the national army in times of crises.
The federal government started to balloon under the Herbert Hoover administration, and became the bloated mess we know today under the FDR administration and not really cut back except under the JFK administration (or at least that was a professed goal of JFK had he lived to a 2nd term) and the Truman administration, where people still remembered the much smaller federal government. World War II grew the U.S. military from the very small number that existed prior to that war to an organization of several million. Nobody since has really tried cut those numbers.
My point is that the federal government was very small at one time, and that it was a large republic with 48 states and not just a loose newly free group of colonies like is sometimes portrayed by people who say the federal government simply must be this size in order to govern effectively. Noting numbers since 1962 is well past when the damage was done.
Of course the UK has a tradition of internal rebellion and forcing the government into concessions that generally have resulted in greater freedoms among its people (with a few setbacks along the way).
Stuff like this used to be mainly done on a local level, where you could always "vote with your feet" and go elsewhere if you didn't like the attitude of a particular county sheriff towards your family (whatever skin color or ethnicity you might have). Quite a few people did pack up and leave, moving from one area to another from time to time.
What is different today is that it is the federal government that is doing stuff like this, where as before they were such a small part of American life that they couldn't do anything like what is happening today. It wasn't that long ago (still in the 20th Century) when the total number of federal employees, including the military and the post office (by far the largest department at the time) numbered just over 100,000 people in a republic of over 200 million. America was governed very well at the time too.
If you want to leave America, where do you go? Edward Snowden has gone to Russia, but is that a realistic option?
Israel had a real persistent terrorist problem with at one point daily bombings in its cities. Ditto for Norther Ireland. Nothing like that has remotely happened in the United States.
If anything, I'd say that Al Qaeda has been completely ineffective and unable to carry on operations that even the Symbionese Liberation Army was able to accomplish (an otherwise no-name group of idiots who managed to pull off a couple of stupid "terrorist" operations prior to 9/11 in the USA). The only place that Al Qaeda seems capable of destroying is Iraq and Afghanistan... mainly killing their own supporters for the most part (and makes you wonder why they have support?)
Because there are other dimensions of political philosophies. Both "conservatives" as well as "liberals" can be strong statists.... people who think the government should get as large as possible and the only distinction is where that money ought to be spent. Others (both "left" and "right") want to push back and tear down the size of government.
There are other dimensions of political thought as well, which is why the distinction is just silly as it was based upon the seating arrangements of the French Parliament in the 19th Century. Don't you think a few new political ideas have been developed over the past century alone?
It could just be a copy of Wikipedia. We won't know what is in that file until after the key is released.
While it would be interesting if it was transcripts of Obama's conversations on September 11th, 2012 in the Oval Office and data dumps from the Pentagon on that day as well (look up the date if you don't know what I'm talking about), there is no proof that the data file means anything at all. As such, it really could just be a publicity stunt, even though the data file is real.
Let's hope that the insurance file really is something worth reading and can't be found anywhere else.
With the drives destroyed, and the leaks plugged, we can all get back to our normal lives under the new heightened levels of paranoia.
Of course the drives were mirrored all over the internet, so by destroying the data on the drives nothing was really accomplished other than an indirect fine charged to the Guardian.... who needed to replace this equipment at their expense so all of that data can be put upon new equipment.
Really, it didn't accomplish anything at all other than making some low level bureaucrat think they accomplished a big deal that ultimately meant nothing at all.
I doubt it was a lack of ideas on what to do with the game. The problem was that almost everything he did was essentially a re-creation of Minecraft, simply set in space. Trying to get away from Minecraft, voxels, and stuff like the Minecraft work bench just proved to be too hard to get away from, particular when his goal was for a similar kind of open-ended game that players could build stuff in.
Supposedly he worked on a spacecraft interior design tool (different from the block placement tool he worked on earlier), and the physics engine in the demo looked pretty good. Some parts were clearly superior to anything done in Minecraft.
It will be interesting to see if anything happens with Trillek. At the moment it is a whole lot of talk and bruised egos with not much code, but I'm hoping that changes. They are still arguing about what compilers are going to be used, and almost universally they are moving away from Java.
As a fan community which attracted a whole bunch of programmers, it isn't surprising that they are picking up their tools and making the game they wanted to play in the first place. I guess that will be a sort of legacy even if Notch is not directly involved. It would be funny as hell if Notch used a pseudonym and joined the community helping to contribute a little bit of code but staying low key otherwise.
The number is 0x10^c..... note the exponent.
Not that it matters much any more, but the number is a fair bit larger.
I disagree. I think rather than resorting to censorship and/or scrapping freedom of speech (Don't bother with fire in a crowded theater analogies; I disagree with that sort of logic too.), we should just accept that casualties sometimes happen. I don't think molesting people at airports is a valid response to terrorism, and I would think that way even if the TSA were effective.
I really hope we are passing each other in terms of what we are talking about here.
This is about people being jackasses and saying extremely mean things, acting like jerks, and being classic trolls on top of making death threats here. This has nothing to do with "free speech" and sure as hell isn't censorship. This is taking people who are acting like a bunch of criminals because they are criminals and violating ethical standards that would not be tolerated at all if you were standing face to face with them.
I still can't possibly believe you support having people die because of your actions, or that you wouldn't lift a finger to try to prevent their death. Seriously, you have got to be one of the most vile souls I can possibly imagine just to think this kind of thing is remotely acceptable.
The choice here is to behave yourself and actually realize that what you type on a forum or in a game might actually have some real-world consequences, where real people can be hurt and hurt profoundly.
WAKE UP AND SEE WHAT YOU ARE TYPING!
Geez, I'm not supporting death squads or for even broad monitoring of network activity. I am asking that if somebody crosses the threshold of being a jackass that such a person can be punished for their actions. Freedom of speech doesn't give you the freedom to hurt people, say things that are patently false, and to besmirch the reputation of another person. This doesn't require new laws to be passed, but rather to have existing laws be enforced in spite of the fact it is an on-line environment.
Yeah, another conspiracy theory. I guess I could have added that to the list of other bullshit reasons people think it exists.
Depending on who you talk to, HAARP is either the U.S. government's attempt to control the global climate and take over the world, is under the control of the Bavarian Illuminati (or the Knights Templar, Masons, Greys, Reptilians, or other sort of conspiracy theory), or it is a research site that is developing RADAR technologies and other radio-frequency based concepts that can be used to protect America from foreign threats and is just another military installation. Perhaps it is just an ordinary "big science" research post doing even more benign and peaceful things.
It is also the butt of a great many jokes from those who've heard the worst of the conspiracy theories to want to puke.
In other words, your statement previously made is simply invalid. I'll also point out that putting in a fake or unmonitored e-mail address can land you in a huge pile of legal trouble when you are "notified" about stuff that really is important (like a court summons or some other legal notice) and you fail to pay attention.
In short, a person following your advise here would just be screwed.
You can make the contact information be a snail-mail address or have the person make some kind of extra hard step to contact you (thus dodging the legal contact requirements) and being a heartless bastard about what anybody else thinks of what you are doing is certainly legally OK. Regardless, you should be aware of what your customers think of you and your products, otherwise you will eventually go out of business or drift into irrelevancy.
If you are doing this for fun and giggles, eventually you will get tired of whatever it is that you are doing and move on, in which case there might as well not even be a fan community for you to worry about. They will just go about their business and copy all of your stuff, just like what happened to Infiniminer.
Heck, there have been people who have been killed or at least forced (from their perspective) into suicide.
The minuscule minority, you mean?
If ANYBODY commits suicide as a result of player actions, I think that is far too much. What kind of callous individual are you to think that it is acceptable to be promoting somebody else's death?
Geez, you've got to be one cold hearted bastard to be thinking this is something remotely acceptable. This kind of cyber bulling can and should be criminally prosecuted with manslaughter charges pressed against those who participate in this kind of action. Just because "it was a game" doesn't cut it at all.
Besides, it has been criminally prosecuted.
Books are likely to be a very bad example, as there certainly are for some authors a huge fan base. Just look at the community that surrounds JK Rowling with regards to the Harry Potter series for a contemporary example. I could even mention CS Lewis with the Chronicles of Narnia (where fans did have some significant input on the story direction) and L. Frank Baum with the "Oz" series where fan mail kept pushing him into writing more and more stories in the series.
Robert Heinlein got so fed up with his fan base that he ended up moving out to the middle of nowhere to explicitly get away from the fans.... and they still tracked him down and set up permanent encampments near his house that needed to be regularly cleaned out by local law enforcement agents. Some of the fans of Heinlein got so fanatical that they literally considered him either the manifestation of God himself or at least a messianic figure close enough that it didn't matter. It has been suggested that perhaps L. Ron Hubbard got some ideas from that experience of Heinlein when setting up.... you figure the rest.
As for movies, I suppose you've never been to a Star Trek convention? The 501st Legion seems to push things to an interesting extreme where those fans certainly are very demanding with the filmmakers. What about the "Hans shot first" controversy?
I really think this is something that simply comes from mass distributed artwork in general. Serial artwork (books, radio serials, movies, computer games) in particular where the fans invest time (whole heaps of time) and money into the art sometimes expect something back and certainly don't like to see a "change in vision".
This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, and I'm glad that some people are talking about it. This shouldn't imply you need to be paranoid when you are in that situation, but to put your head in a hole and pretend these issues are not worthy of even thinking about them or doing some advanced planning to avoid some of the problems which come from fan/developer interactions is also just as silly.
Where do you draw the line of simple banter and what becomes something serious to bring in the real life law enforcement agents to get involved? I've certainly had people on-line make death threats to me.... both saying they hated my personna and avatar where they would lay in wait on PVP worlds or do other things to really screw up my account.... as well as some where I really did get worried that they would do something in real life to me or my family.
In one case, I did call up a law enforcement agent and they agreed with me after seeing the conversation (I kept a screen shot of what was written) that it was enough to start a formal investigation. Stuff like that happens.
Heck, there have been people who have been killed or at least forced (from their perspective) into suicide. When that happens, those who want to ban these games gain moral authority and certainly political capital to shut stuff like these games down.
Part of good game development business practice is to NEVER have developers talking directly to fans or viceversa. There should be middlemen who do that, namely community coordinators, moderators and such.
The problem is if you are a new independent start-up that is essentially a one-man show. I would like to point out the experience of Marcus "Notch" Persson who literally did everything in the company at first from writing the HTML for the website, the back end server work, and the actual game development. Yes, now he has the money to hire people to do all of that stuff, but he was at least at first doing everything on his own.
There are other similar very small game development companies I've interacted with that are in a similar position... even with very popular games. Even using the example of Notch those developers start out by interacting with just a small number of die hard fans, but sometimes either they strike gold or some sort of "magic" happens where whatever they produce becomes extremely popular in spite of their small size. They love the interaction with fans, but eventually get real tired of all of the attention.
The question here really is how do you deal with fans in a company where you are so small that you simply must wear multiple hats? You might be able to enlist some volunteers from the fan base, such as what Jimmy Wales ended up doing with Wikipedia in a mostly volunteer effort including some substantial software development and server operations. Still, even those volunteers have limits and eventually you need at least some people who are paid for what they are doing. If you have a smash hit, it becomes even harder as sometimes the growth of the fan base gets ahead of any effort to get community managers (especially paid ones) in position to deal with them.
It is a nice idea in concept, and when a game development company is in a position to separate the fans (heck, any sort of direct customer interaction for any kind of software development) from the developers it is a good thing. I was a software developer on some major software projects, and thank goodness I only provided tertiary support backing up other customer support representatives. Even then, I often made some pretty awful mistakes when I ended up needing to deal directly with customers.... in spite of the fact I gained a reputation of almost always solving the problems involved (hence why I got many of those kind of support calls). Larger and well established companies certainly should put up some sort of barrier between the developers and the fans.