I'm sorry, but the CNN article doesn't say he visited a porn site. It says that he visited an Internet chat room, supposedly for some kind of sexual gratification. (So at worst he "cybersexed" someone, at worst it could have been just as well an IRC channel for something else (there are channels for everything, including network administration, games, etc) and some idiot PHB applied an "IRC is for evil hackers and porn" preconception. We probably won't know which, as there are compelling arguments for both: the boss maybe isn't that stupid, but then some employees are smart enough to not connect to sexnet on the company computer too.)
Anyway, keywords: chat room.
Now I'm not advocating mis-use of the employer's resources, but let me also say: there was nothing for someone else to see on his screen either way. It's just a rectangular window with some text in it, not some big picture with a woman taking it up the rear end. To even see what he's chatting there, you'd have to pretty much go and read over his shoulder. And he can close the window long before you even figure out what's really going on in that chat. So the whole "oh, the humanity, someone could have seen it on his screen" argument just doesn't apply here, sorry.
And that is, again, why I wonder about the whole thing. Short of using a keylogger or other spyware, how can you tell that someone is on a chat-room/IRC for sex or not? You can't just see it on their screen, normally. I doubt that he just left the window open and continued blissfully cybering with the boss around reading over his shoulder. I doubt that he was caught with his pants down and his dick in his hand, or anything as clearly cut. Basically likely all they knew is that he's on a chat room.
So again, I'm not advocating mis-use of the employer's resources, but firing someone for "porn surfing" in a situation like that _may_ be just an undeserved insult.
Well, we can aggree pretty quickly about most of what you wrote there, since it's insightful and partially common sense.
But in that message I was talking about really the monomyth structure of the game's story, not about the grind. UT for example may have "grind", if that's how you choose to play it, but doesn't have a monomyth structure as far as I can tell. (Not having a story as such anyway, for a start.) You can "grind" Everquest or WOW, and certainly a lot of people do, but neither really has an actual monomyth story, or not in any major way. Especially if you just grind it, chances are you wouldn't notice even a vague resemblance.
What I'm talking about are games which are strongly story-based, and base that story on the hero's journey. In (real) CRPGs the story is a lot more central a point than in UT, and a lot of what you do in a game isn't just grind for better equipment, it's basically a device to give you the next bit of story. And you can notice when you do stuff for no other reason than to goad and herd you along the monomyth path. It's not even grinding anything (xp, rank, equipment, whatever), it's just being forced for example to do mundane stuff to show you that your character starts as an ordinary everyday Joe.
If you're familiar with UT, imagine first being forced to endure half an hour of running around doing the dishes and taking out the trash around the house, just to show you that your character was once a peaceful father in the suburbs, before becoming an arena champion. Imagine it's stuff that doesn't even help you with your grind or rankings. In fact, it happens before you can even get into the arena and get your first kill, to get you started on your way to playing with the champions. It's just there to force-feed you a superfluous prescribed step of the monomyth. You probably wouldn't put up with it in UT, would you? Well, we often have to put up with just that in some RPGs. (Some, not all. Others do use that time as a tutorial, though.) That's what I'm talking about.
And it's not retroactively applying narrative theory to it. Hollywood for example doesn't just accidentally rehash stories that just happen look like the hero's journey. Actually, they actively write their scripts to that recipe. At some point in the past someone, I forget who at this hour, circulated a study on the hero's journey around at Hollywood, and a group of producers bought it big time and made it the inofficial movie recipe. Base your script on this exact recipe or take a hike. And that was pretty much the moment any other kind of narrative died in North American cinematography.
Now I'm not sure if game designers/publishers actually have a requirement to follow the monomyth or take a hike. But it's hard not to notice when you're beat upside the head with it the 100'th time.
You miss the whole point of what I was saying there.
All of this applies to only the first 20 levels of the game -- which just happens to be the level cap for trial accounts.
So basically, in the end you just illustrate exactly what I was saying: in WoW you start more powerful (compared to equal level mobs) at level 1 than you'll be at level 70. Yes, you'll still be relatively uber for 20 levels, and then it will actually go slightly downwards. That was all the point I was making. (Funny the things you can discover if you have the attention span and mental agility to read more than 3 rows before jumping in to do your own ego masturbation and call people fanboys.)
There seems to be this mis-conception that "character progression" in an RPG must be the exact opposite of WoW. That you _must_ start too wimpy to even kill a level 1 kobold, and must progress to being a walking nuke at level 20 (or 60 or 100 or whatever) that can wipe out several armies of level equal level NPCs. That at level 1 you must be so wimpy that even a kitten can maul you, and you can't even do more than run petty erands for random villagers. That being useless and bored at level 1 is somehow a condition to feeling great later.
And that just isn't set in stone. The most successful MMO goes exactly the opposite way around. You start powerful, and, yes, as you did notice, it actually goes downhill. Compared to the equal level NPCs, at level 20 you're less tough than you were at level 1, at level 40 you're less tough than at level 20 (and now you have a horse, but spend even more time on the road than at level 20), and at level 60 you need 40 people to do anything.
That said,
After level 20 the game becomes a tedious grind to reach level cap. There is nothing worthwile to do prior to level cap because anything you work hard for is going to be obsoleted in a couple of levels.
If you got yourself into only mindlessly caring about levels and equipment, I can see how it got boring. A lot of people seem to have this... silly idea, that somehow it's some race against the clock to level 60, that they must work day and night and never care for more than getting one level closer to that precious deadline. In the process, they miss the whole actual game that is there between levels 1 and 59, because instead of playing it and taking the momentary rewards and achievements for what they are, they were grinding to reach 60.
As some friendly advice, either quit the game completely or try to stop and smell the roses. Enjoy the game for what it is right there and then. If you're level 21, enjoy being level 21 for now. Sure, maybe that new level 20 weapon won't last you more than until level 25. But enjoy it while it lasts. Take it for what it is now, not throught the shit-coloured goggles of "argh, must grind to the max level, and this won't last until level 60". Be glad you got it as it is. Take some time to explore. Take some time to make some friends.
Yes, WoW isn't perfect by any measure, and it does go downhill. But that's no reason to make your stay even shittier, if you decided to stay anyway.
The game doesn't start with the level 60 raids. That's what happened (before BC) after the game was already ended. They were an unholy grind for people who just didn't know when to quit. WoW didn't have them initially, so people reached level 60 and started whining that there's no more content. The game, as originally designed, had already ended. Finish. Curtain fell. End game. Some people just didn't accept that. The grind/raid instances were added to give them something to do, pointless and unrewarding as it was. But at any rate, that wasn't the meat of the game. The _real_ game was levels 1 to 59.
And that's what all those "argh, must grind to max level fast" people are missing: the whole actual game. There are a lot of smaller achievements between levels 1 and 59. Enjoy them for what they are. If you just play through the game with the
Well, now whether a game's story is also _good_, that's another story. Very few game designers are also, well, good novelists and playwrights. And if you want an _original_ story too, well, now that's gonna be a problem to even get a publisher for. The PC games world is _very_ risk-adverse lately, so anything non-standard has an uphill battle against the cliched stuff that's already known to sell.
So on the whole, I'll mostly say "amen" to all you've said there.
Still, if that's what's available, I'll take a mediocre cliched story insted of no story.
Well, see, the funny thing is that _the_ most successful MMORPG (it has RPG in the name at least) is exactly what you describe as "non-fun". And funnily it has over 90% of the MMO market. So most people actually find that fun, eh?
The thing is, in WoW, you may be level 1, but you start massively "uber" compared to similar level enemies. The wolves and kobolds in Northshire do 1 hp per attack, ffs. Not 1d6 or anything. Just 1 to 1. You have massive hp for your level, you hit several _times_ harder than any enemy, your hp regens right back in no time (which is why so few people appreciate a Paladin or Priest early), travel times are short, your equipment is perfectly adequate without any grinding or farming, etc. The only way to die even if you wanted to is to herd a small army of enemies or jump off Teldrassil if you're an elf. _Totally_ uber.
You'll even get your first non-soloable boss at all at level 10 or so. (Hogger, if you're a human, different ones for the others.) Until then, you're _the_ uber-soldier that can mow down NPCs left and right with impunity.
You're in some ways more uber than you'll be at level 70. You'll need damn good equipment to be uber at level 70, while at level 1 you're uber even naked. In some ways your whole progression through WoW is struggling to hold onto that level 1 god-like power as the enemies grow faster than your base stats do. You even end up letting go of some of that power in some domains, to better hang on to it in other domains. (The choice of talent trees, for example.)
Guess what? It's fun if done right.
Look, level and equipment progressions are good and motivating, but there's no reason to be dumb about it. Which is what a lot of game designers are.
Yes, you grow up in levels/spells/equipment, but so do the enemies. _That_ is the motivator in gaining levels. But against equal level enemies you can do well from day 1 and it _will_ be fun. Starting level 1 does _not_ mean you have to start an unsurvivable peasant against level 1 enemies. It just means you won't kill any level 20s for now, but against level 1 enemies you can still be as powerful as you want to.
I'm not saying I should start level 100 with a nuke. But my level 1 mage should still be perfectly able to kill a level 1 rat or kobold or whatever your game is all about. My level 1 modern soldier should be able to draw that pistol or M-16 he's been trained to use, and actually shoot a level 1 enemy. My level 1 padawan in a SW setting should be perfectly able to kill a level 1 Greedo, if he picks on me instead of Han. Etc. There is simply no bloody reason why, at _any_ point in the game, I shouldn't be able to put up a good fight against an _equal_ level enemy.
It also doesn't mean you have to start doing boring mundane stuff like rescuing kittens from trees and picking apples in the garden.
Nah, D&D isn't the culprit. Look, it's not about starting with a nuke spell and a vorpal sword, it's about starting doing boring, stupid, mundane, unimporting things like catching flies for your sister's collection or returning books to the library. There's nothing in D&D to enforce that. You could start a level 1 with a kitchen knife in D&D and still be right in the middle of something extremely important, if your GM had imagination.
The real culprit is the thrice-accursed Monomyth a.k.a. The Hero's Journey script that we got in video games via Hollywood. (Yes, if you thought 90% of what Hollywood produces is the exact same script with different props and details, you'd be right: it _is_ the same rehashed script.)
That script requires certain steps. You must start with an everyman character (Joe Average, basically) doing mundane things, that the viewer can empathise with. You don't even give him his goal until the middle of the story. Etc.
Now that by itself gets boring when I have seen the exact same script 100 times before in a movie, or in a game. But in a game the problems are just starting:
1. Who's doing it? In a movie I'm leaning back and just watching the hero do those mundane things for a while, and that's ok. In a game I'm required to actually do them. It's a bigger turn off. Sorry, that's not what I bought a game for. If I wanted to experience my barbarian's life as a peasant before the big life-changing events, I'd go back to playing Harvest Moon.
Now I'm not saying there should be only combat, far from it, but spare me the meaningless "see, as you start as an average joe" chores. Make it important. If it's just the "you started as a peasant" intro, then make it the FMV intro to the game and let me at the controls when I have something finally important to achieve. I'm not saying it should be the final goal from the start either. Just _something_ important.
FF7 for example got this right: you start as a mercenary in the middle of a mission to blow up a power plant. It's not the final goal, so it doesnt spoil story progression. But it's not boring, mundane and uninteresting either. You're someone, you're (supposedly) the trained professional these guys hired, and you're doing something fitting your (supposed) qualification and worth your fee. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
2. Time involved? In a 90 minute movie, the mundane intro parts are maybe 15 minutes. In an 18 hour game that would proportionally be 3 hours. Thankfully nowadays most game designers do drastically shorten it too, but there _are_ clueless attempts at applying the monomyth to the letter. Even if it means 3 hours worth of running around returning library books and lost puppies. Frankly, if 15 minutes are enough to introduce the characters in a movie, they're enough in a game too. There's no need to scale everything equally.
3. Does it even serve the same purpose? A movie is watched mostly in one go. A game isn't. Even _if_ that intro part served some purpose in a movie, for the transition between mundane and the movie world, that is lost in a game as soon as I save now and reload the next day. The next day I start directly in the middle of it without any such transition.
And frankly, by now we have plenty of evidence that it actually works perfectly without such transitions. There is no massive problem suspending disbelief when you reload directly in the middle of the plot. So why do we need it in the beginning anyway?
4. Scaling and time again. The monomyth taken literally is ok for a 3 hour story, but not for a 30 hour game. Building up linearly to the climax in 20 hours and coming down in 10 is boring. Even novels use multiple interwoven plots to keep it interesting over long periods of time.
There was this unsavoury comparing a good video game plot to multiple female orgasms, with plateaus and peaks all over the plac
Nope, it wasn't even the BSA, it was the Russian state suing this guy all along. It was a criminal, not a civil case.
Gorbachev just used this case to get some free publicity as some kind of Defender Of The Russian People, but his letter to Bill Gates was as irrelevant as it could possibly get for this case. There were no charges that MS could _possibly_ drop, since MS (or BSA) had not pressed any charges against him to start with. It's that simple.
The only moment I know of when MS was in any way even contacted by the Russian authorities about this case was when the Russians offered this teacher a weird "we'll let you go if you apologize nicely to MS" bargain. AFAIK, MS actually accepted that, but the teacher refused and preferred to go to trial.
Honestly, I'm disappointe to heck and back in Slashdot's coverage of this. Even by bleating zealot standards, this is stupid. God knows there's enough to complain about MS, there's no reason to dillute it with falsehoods and whines. I'd rather that people would get the real message loud and clear about what MS _does_ do wrong, than leave a general impression of just having a bunch of incoherent whiners against it. The former might change people's minds, the latter will even get MS sympathy.
I'm playing strategy games too, so I see your point. Yes, there is a certain similarity in play styles that I like.
But what I want in an RPG, primarily, is, well, to be told a good story. And preferrably not just a quick update while the next combat map loads. Call it an interactive novel, if you will. So switching to strategy games is not exactly an apples-to-apples substitute there. Having solid strategy/tactical mechanics in combat is very much appreciated and important to me, don't get me wrong, but in an RPG they're the means not the end.
To go on a tangent of an example: It's sorta like having nice weapons in a FPS, if you will: those weapons are tools to an end, not the end itself. It's nice (maybe even expected and essential nowadays) to have good, well balanced ones, but it's not the whole purpose of the game. But when I play a FPS, I expect FPS gameplay, not just a list of guns. Similarly when I play RPG, I primarily expect an RPG, not just the tactics part.
And therein lies a double disappointment for me these days:
1. A lot of "RPGs" _are_ dumbed down to having even less story than a strategy game. Sure, that's not the case with some top titles like Oblivion or NWN2, but there's a whole army of hack-and-slash and Diablo clones which only have at most a few one-liners between battle maps as the whole story. Not only they're mindless click-fests _in_ combat, they're made for the masses of illiterates who are proud that they don't read any more. (You know, the "if I wanted to read a story I'd read a book" kind, except he's never actually read a book since the school either.) There's very little story to be found in them, beyond the most minimalistic half-baked excuse to go shoot up (or slice up) the next map too.
2. It doesn't help that Turn-Based Strategy is an endangered species either. Even if I wanted to give up on RPG and go full-time strategy, how much choice do I have there? Sure, there's DIsgaea and a few others, but the keyword is: "few".
Disclaimer: actually I'm not against MS, nor against F/OSS, I don't think either programs are that bad... but some of the arguments there come out as bull in this particular case. Sorry.
3: Russia already has warned any researcher in coming to the USA (dmitri skylarov vs adobe)
Which is irrelevant to this case too. We're not talking some security researcher who disclosed a security vulnerability, nor even cracked some DRM, but about someone who allegedly pirated some programs. I'm willing to bet that there was exactly zero research involved.
4: Do we trust a US company or open source that anybody can review? China already supports Red Flag Linux.
Sorry, but... Here I'll call outright bullshit. Sorry, this is _not_ about "let's use F/OSS instead of closed source", it's about using pirated closed source programs. If they wanted to support F/OSS, they could have done so, but no, they wanted to keep using Windows for free. There's a freakin' huge difference there.
And spare me the emotional parts about trust, please. So they can trust closed source if it's pirated? Does Windows become more open if you use a pirated serial number? Does Office save its files in a less proprietary format just because it's on a CD-R? WTF?
There _are_ good arguments for trusting F/OSS instead of closed source programs and proprietary formats. That senator from IIRC Peru made a damn good case for example. But this case isn't it. It's plain and simple about pirating closed source programs. If you will, it's exactly the _opposite_: these guys decided that they can trust MS and closed source all right, they just don't want to pay.
Step out of the "yay, they stuck it to MS" mentality a little, and you may see that there's little to celebrate. There would have been ways to make a pro-OSS or anti-closed-source point, but that was not what happened here. They just gave a vote of confidence to MS, if anything. Price being equal (free as in beer, even if by virtue of being stolen beer) they just decided they'd rather use Windows.
And, without going into your other points in detail, for the people of Russia I see even less to celebrate in this mockery of justice. It just shows that the whole country, including prominent figures like Gorbachev and (scarily enough) their president Putin, just can't wrap their head around such notions as "rule of the law". They're still stuck in the soviet era mentality, where "justice" is something based on scapegoats, favoritism, nepotism and rich powerful guys punishing the little guys they don't like. E.g., Gorbachev just showed that he has no freakin' clue what's the difference between a criminal case and Bill Gates persecuting a poor teacher.
If that's the kind of politicians and mentality that Russia still has, then I feel genuinely sorry for those people.
Well, how does it feel, Microsoft? Someone "innovates" a little of your "intellectual property" (stole it fair and square, actually) and the courts don't think it's worth prosecuting. "Ohhhh, no harm done..." Just a little tiny pin prick of what the rest of the planet's actual innovators have been putting up with from Microsoft (and the lenient courts) all these years.
I'd see your point if he was tried for a patent violation, or any other kind of stealing an _idea_. But he pirated a product. It's the difference between copying the suspension idea for a Ferrari and breaking into a Ferrary for a joy ride. It's not even remotely the same thing.
Plus, MS until _very_ recently didn't even bother much with patents, and I still don't know of any case when they sued someone for patent infringements. And then mostly started patenting stuff when they got sued for blindingly obvious patents. So from an idea exchange point of view, MS practices what it preaches, so to speak. Or at least certainly doesn't bother preaching against it either.
And before someone comes up with some lame "haha, but MS never innovated anything so they couldn't sue" slogan, actually they did come with new (if not spectacular) stuff, and at any rate bought other companies which did. So, you know, even if those guys didn't work for MS at the time when they invented that stuff, MS now owns their IP anyway. Not saying that it makes MS the great innovator, but they do own some original IP, even if by buying it. That's what I'm saying. So if they did try to block everything infringing on that IP, you'd see a _lot_ of (frivolous) litigation coming from Redmond.
To put it into perspective, other companies have litigated for as little as your app _looking_ like theirs. There were lawsuits coming out of Lotus like crazy against everyone with the menus at the bottom for example. If MS were to try to do that, ooer, you'd see some serious lawsuits against every sod who made a xine-based player that looks like Windows Media Player. Or Mono? Ooer. That would be some litigation potential. If you think that.NET's not patentable because it's a Java clone, lemme remember that Sun got a patent as idiotic as the very idea of "a virtual machine with less than X opcodes" (where X was, I think 200 or so, so not even that challenging or innovative.) Yes, you heard that right: they didn't invent the VM, but got a patent on one with fewer opcodes than before anyway. Don't think that innovation or litigating over them is restricted only to great earth-shattering paradigm-shifting inventions, that's what I'm saying.
Basically if this guy had stolen an idea from MS, like, I don't know, making an Aero-like window manager for KDE or Gnome, probably MS couldn't care less. (I know Aero is the bad example and not original, but bear with me. Replace it with implementing DirectX 10 in Wine, or implementing some new protocol as a kernel driver, or whatever else instead, if it makes you feel any better.)
But he didn't, he just pirated Windows. Which, frankly, I'm hard pressed to see as some great "revenge of the innovators" act, in any form or shape.
Yes, I'm a bitter little troll so blast me a new one.
Disclaimer: Now I'm _not_ a F/OSS zealot usually, and probably half the/. crowd would normally find me leaning towards the MS side. Heck, by/. standards I've even been accused of being a MS fanboy before, although God knows it's not hard to get called that here. But in this case I find it sad and counter-productive for F/OSS too.
Yes, _if_ he had used GPL software, all that would have happened. Except he didn't use OSS, he just went and pirated Windows instead. And the whole case just created a precedent for that too. There are millions of computers in Russia which could have a financial incentive to use some free (at least as in beer) software instead or some cheap local software. Now they'll keep using a pirated version of Windows instead. Congrats.
All piracy helps kill isn't the big software houses, but they help kill their small competitors. Piracy didn't kill MS Office, but it helped nearly kill Star Office and the horde of smaller options that used to exist. Sure, they missed 90% of the Office features that 90% of the population never needed, but they would have been plenty enough and cheap for writing a recipe or a CV in. If the option really were "do I get MS Office for a shitload of money, or Someone1234 Write for very little money, or KWrite for free", the second and third options would look a lot more viable. But when the option becomes "I can copy all them for free, so do I get MS Office or Someone1234 Write or KWrite", the choice also becomes "WTF, let's get MS Office then."
People don't all drive Ferraris, so some go buy a modest small car instead, because they can't pirate a car. So a lot more options exist. In the software world they pirate the big thing, and let the smaller budget options die.
Worse yet, the illusion of ubiquitousness helped kill competition even further past some point. Let's all pirate Office at home because that's what we use at work too. And let's then all install Office at work, because, wth, everyone already knows how to use their pirated copy at home.
And what do you think that does to F/OSS in Russia too? There could have been local distros, small local companies maybe customizing it for schools or offering cheap tech support/installations, etc. There could have been kids learning to use KDE or Gnome instead of XP's shitty Fischer Price interface (unless you disable the fluff), and maybe having a look at the code, in those schools. Now they'll all grow on pirated Windows software, and continue to not even understand the "use the free choice, if you can't afford the behemoth" idea. Probably not even understanding why and how it would help to contribute some code to the free choice. Why would you bother when you know everyone will just pirate Windows instead? Way to go.
We mostly seem to aggree. The only thing I'd somewhat debate is the "They don't realize what they are doing to others" part. Most tend to realize very well what they're doing to others, and may be even entertained by it. What they don't realize is why on Earth would they really care about any damage done to others.
Wow. I never really thought of myself as a sociopath. You really opened up my eyes. I can't explain why, but for some reason, I feel a lot better. Thank you.
Well, as usual, I'd say don't just take the word of some random guy off Slashdot. Have a look at the APD list first if you want to be sure, and maybe ask a qualified psychiatrist.
That said, glad to be of service. You may have a nice way up the corporate pyramid ahead of if you are one. Corporations are expected to basically act like gigantic sociopaths, and unsurprisingly a lot of CEOs and such are sociopaths.
You have to remember that technology isn't composed just of the enthusiastic nerds developping it, but also of the morally-challenged marketeers selling half-baked technologies as the solution to all world's problems and then some. The nerd working on the recognition algorithm may well be aware of the limitations and need for improvement, but that doesn't ever stop the marketting team from selling something that's not even half-ready for RL use.
Does your company give out a "sociopathic manager of the year" award, too?
Don't worry. I guarantee you'll regret being such an jerk to people when you're passing middle age and you've got mountains of "stuff" to your name but not a real friend in the world.
_If_ he's a sociopath (you can't diagnose that from just one message), it just doesn't work that way. You're making the usual mistake of assuming that all humans are essentially, well, equally human and you only need appeal to someone's humanity/feelings/moral-sense/flash-of-enlightenme nt to thaw even the coldest heart. We like to think that assholes are just the result of some trauma making them retreat behind a facade of callousness, and it only takes some emotional argument to get them out of that shell. Which makes great for great novels movies, but isn't what psychiatry tells us.
Sociopathy is, simply put, completely lacking the empathy and connection to other humans. It's being the only human in a single-player world full of generic NPCs. They're not your peers, they don't matter, their feelings don't matter, they're there just to be used, abused, manipulated, lied to, whatever gets you closer to your objectives.
Think of your relationship to NPCs in a computer game. Do you really care what that generic NPC in Oblivion or GTA feels or thinks? Do you care if he/she had a bad day, or if his/her kid is sick? Would you feel any sense of accomplishment of having him/her as a friend? Would you feel bad for clicking on a complete lie dialogue choice just to finish a quest? Would you even really think of them as a "he" or a "she", or more along the lines of "it"? I mean, don't be silly, it's just a game and just a scripted NPC. Right?
Well, in a nutshell that's the kind of world that a sociopath lives in. You can't even be seen as a friend by one. You're at most a sucker to be used for a purpose, even if that purpose is a few minutes of entertainment.
So expecting that one would wake up one day and think "man, I wasted my life, I should have made friends" is naive. That's the kind of notion that doesn't even compute in their world. Or not for the same meaning of "friend" that you'd use.
The worse problem, when you think about it, is the number of persons that are going to be scanned.
E.g., let's say you stick this in an airport, and give it an insane resolution camera. You want to identify suspects quickly in a crowd, right? So if this thing is this good at scanning people without even having them look in a gizmo, better batch scan any iris that has enough pixels on that camera, right?
The problem there is that there'll be maybe a thousand people in any place in the airport at a time, so around 10 of them will be falsely identified. That's just in one scanning everyone in the room.
Now think the hundreds of thousands of people moved by a reasonable airport daily, their families coming with them to the airport, etc. Oooer. Now that's some serious false positives.
Multiply this by a a generous number of cameras scattered all over the place. A 1 false match in 100 scans pretty much means just that: if you take the same person and walk him past 100 cameras, on the average 1 of them will identify him as someone else. Stick enough of these cameras on an airport, and everyone will get at least one false match by just walking from one gate to another, maybe with a detour to the toilet/bar/whatever.
And I don't even want to think of the janitors, security guards, airline personnel, etc. Those are going to get scanned again and again thousands of times a day, producing anywhere between tens and hundreds of false matches each.
Basically: think of the worst "the Pope, Bush and Osama walk onto a plane" joke and a camera somewhere will produce exactly that kind of false match. Daily.
Now for the second problem: picture being placed somewhere at the scene of a crime by such a false match. 99% accuracy sounds just about guaranteed to have been you to the average jurror.
You're making the assumption that "if noone patented it, noone thought about it", which is, sad to say, bogus. Some people just don't run to the patent office for each and single triviality.
In this case, for example, there I can remember at least two cases of phones built just like that. One even made it all the way to being marketted. (Dunno if it actually sold or not, though.) So, yes, other people "skilled in the art" _did_ think of it before. Go figure.
The problem there stems from the fact that this seems to be little more than a pixel counter. I.e., to measure something you'd have had to stick the label on it and to have taken a nice full frontal picture of it.
So the way I see it, if you remembered to do that, then you pretty much remembered to measure it in the first place. If you didn't, well, you're going to go back anyway.
And if it shows up at the right angle in the picture of something else you did measure, then it doesn't do anything you couldn't have done with any graphics editing program. (E.g., Gimp as a free one.) You don't even need a CAD program. If it shows you the pixel coordinates of the mouse pointer, there you go: measure the known object in pixels(the difference between the coordinates at one end and the ones at the other end), measure the unknown object in pixels, do some elementary maths. You'll have the same accuracy this thing has.
Or disable the depth blur. I still remember going back to COH after the I6 or I7 patch hit, can't really remember which. So they've added all these nice detailed textures everywhere, bumpmapping and... wtf... anything farther than 100 ft or so looks like smeared crap. Like a bubblejet printed picture left out in the rain. Then I turn off the new depth blur option and everything's sharp again.
So, yeah, if you find yourself having a bad case of myopia IRL, look for that setting in the options.
Kidding aside, that's one thing that... makes me seriously wonder, to say the least. More than a decade of hardware acceleration, billions of R&D dollars spent on making cards powerful enough for 16x anisotropy and 6x FSAA in 1600x1200, more texture memory and bandwidth than you can shake a DMA at, and... we use it to make it all look blurry and shitty like it's 1991 again. Who comes up with this kind of ideas anyway?
From what I can tell, Novell is just playing it safe.
The fact is: there's a lot of GPL-ed code out there that _is_, in fact, encumbered by IP problems as it is. If you want to be free of any patents or other IP issues, then for example I hope you're not using or distributing an MP3 player or DVD player.
And for a while that's just what Novell did. E.g., one of my annoyances with SuSE 10.0 (which is the one I'm using) is that they removed all MP3 codecs, all DVD decoding, etc. They actually crippled their version Xine to no longer play DVDs, and Kaffeine to display a message saying it won't play DVDs for legal reasons. They have an XMMS version that won't play MP3's. (How stupid is that?) Etc. I have a whole Multimedia group in the Applications menu that won't, in fact, play 90% of the media out there.
The problem is that such a system isn't very useful outside a small (compared to the OS market size) community of nerds. It's a great system for writing code on, but, well, you better be comfortable with downloading and compiling anything media related yourself if you want to actually have a usable home computer. You and I may be, but Joe Average isn't. And even I find it stupid. It's not just the extra inconvenience of having to download and compile that stuff myself, it also shifted a chunk of responsibility upon me for doing so. _If_ there's some actual IP problem there, I just lost that "your honour, I have no idea, it just came with the distro" excuse.
Now I don't know if there are actual legal problems there or Novell's managers are just paranoid. I'm not a lawyer. But I can't really blame them, because they are a big target. And have been under active underhanded attack from MS before, more than once. MS actively killed both DR DOS _and_ an attempt by Novell to offer their own alternative to using MS's servers for workstation logins. (Callous as it may sound, MS just informed Novell that if they ship something like that, MS _will_ break it. And they did. Repeatedly. MS just changed the undocumented APIs to keep making Novell's client no longer work.)
So as far as I can tell, they went and bought some patent protection at least from MS. Maybe they even signed off their soul, future and firstborn in the process. (Companies who make too tight deals with MS tend to end up dead in the long run, somehow.) But in the end it's just business as usual in corporate land. I find it hard to believe that they'd even bother with some anti-GPL conspiracy there. Most corporations don't fight crusades, anti-GPL or otherwise. Even MS wouldn't really give a damn if it wasn't a direct competition issue. Most other people don't really give a damn one way or another. They just cover their asses. Which includes that they also don't make grand last stand to make an anti-patent point. Not only they'd get buried in lawsuits, some from their own investors, they'd even lose other corporate clients who also don't want to be martyrs in an anti-patent crusade.
No, you're missing the point. Tirades about freedom are good and fine, but at some point "toe the party line and shut up" clauses are the exact opposite of freedom any way you want to slice it. Freedom is about people, not about code, not about computers. The moment you start restricting what whole businesses are supposed to do -- and not even with the code, but generally what deals they can make, what IP they can have, what software (even unrelated to your code) they're allowed to write -- you've lost the whole plot completely. You're proposing... what? That you can dictate what others can and can't do, in the name of _freedom_? Heh. Oh, the irony.
The comparison with banana republic dictatorships was there for a reason. Those people ended up losing their basic freedoms in the name of some supposed "workers' democracy" or "freedom" rhetoric too. You start by fighting some actual colonial oppressors, which has a moral and ethical justification all right. But then all of a sudden you're not allowed to even talk to anyone from outside anymore, (supposedly) just to be sure that noone betrays state secrets to the foreign colonialists and imperialists. Suddenly you need the Party's approval to even travel abroad, because you could be recruited by those hostile colonial/imperialist powers there. You need the Party's approval to even start or be a manager in a company, because it could cooperate with those hostile colonial/imperialist powers. Etc. In effect they just replaced one opressor with an even worse oppressor, and in the name of defeating one enemy just lost even more rights and freedoms.
But to return to the topic: if suddenly the GPL is about idealist crusades against the very notions of IP, closed source, etc, (as opposed to being just a license as to what can I do with the code, as is the case now) so my benefit from that crusade is... what, then? No, not generic "but your code/files/etc stay free!!!" ideology, but actual benefits. So I gain some great freedom for my code, at the expense that suddenly someone else is in charge of what business models I can use, what programs can I write, what can I patent, who can I make deals with, etc?
Sorry to break it to you, but Microsoft's gives me a better deal there, as freedoms go. Sure, I don't get their code, and supposedly some day they could even *gasp* change their XML formats so I need an XSLT to convert my Office files, etc. On the other hand, they never claimed any right to tell me what to do in any other aspect. So I lose some freedom of the code/data, but keep my basic rights as a human instead of being a slave to someone's crusader army. Sounds like a _great_ deal to me.
Also, here's an idea. You know, from a user of open source software, by your distinction. Instead of being on some black-and-white crusade about what _could_ happen in some alternate worst-case-scenario ultra-slippery-slope universe, maybe take the time to analyze what happens here and now. Some things are not actually the Antichrist and embodiment of ultimate evil. A lot of things are, at best, an inconvenience. Sure, it's nice to be able to avoid them, but I'm _not_ going to sell myself into indentured servitude to some rebel army just to avoid a milder inconvenience that _could_ happen sometime in the future.
E.g., maybe the OOo XML is a better XML format than Office's, for example, but in the end the worst that can happen is that I need to spend a couple of hours (heck, let's even say days, or even weeks) writing an XSLT to convert between them. Even with a binary format, heck, worst that can happen is that I need to buy a new Office version and write a small VB script that loads the old files and exports them to another format. It's not some great loss of liberties, it's an inconvenience. It would be nice to not have it, but it's not the end of the world. As I was saying, I'm _not_ going to give up other freedoms just to avoid _that_ kind of minor pain in the butt scenario. If the price to keep my files free of Microsoft's "tyrany" is to, basically,
Well, now that would be a great way for OSS to shoot itself in the foot. "Here, we'll give you some ideological crusade disguised as a license, and we can revoke it at any time for as little as making a deal with a corporation we don't like, or having more patents than we like, or also distributing some closed source programs we don't like, or simply because we've had a bad day and don't like you any more." Dunno about Novell, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of companies would drop Linux like a hot potato. Heck, I would, and I'm writing this in Linux.
The thing is, the whole thing doesn't even have a moral high ground any more if it tries to rule with an iron fist over anything else you might do, including business relations, deals, IP, God-knows-what-else. I mean, wth, if MS even hinted at including a "we can revoke your license if you make deals with companies we don't personally approve of" clause in their EULA, everyone would be screaming bloody murder. Yet here we are talking about, basically, "let's change the GPL so we can punish Novel for making a deal with MS", as if it was some righteous thing to do. WTF?
The very idea of sneaking in some sort of "thou shalt not make deals with MS" or generally "though shalt toe the party line" in the name of "freedom of speech" rethoric is... bizarre, to say the least. If ESR and RMS have freedom so dear (and you'd think so given all the rants about how the GPL is all about your freedom), then the advice that comes to mind is to actually respect it, and I don't mean just for code. Freedom means just that: being free to do whatever the heck you like. Including dealing with MS, writing/installing/distributing a binary-only module, or whatever. As long as I'm _not_ in fact suppressing your coding freedoms, have the decency to not try to suppress my (other) freedoms either.
Honestly, the whole idea is reminiscent of some of the worst crops of banana-republic dictatorships. Start by fighting some colonial/imperialist/whatever oppressor, and end up with less freedoms than you had under the old colonial oppressors.
The problem there is that that junk moves very very fast. In fact, so fast that it makes anti-tank sabot rounds seem like sedated snails by comparison. At the speeds involved, even for the tiniest such objects the energy and momentum are nuts. IIRC in the 80's a speck of paint dented the space shuttle's windshield. The larger objects that can be tracked, well, now _those_ pack quite the punch.
So, well, how are you going to collect them? You'd pretty much either need to send a tank into orbit, or very very precisely match orbit with each and every single such thing to collect it. The problem is that the latter can be an even more expensive exercise than the former. You either launch a ship for each such piece of debris, or need a helluva lot of fuel to switch orbits if you want to pick one at a time without coming back each time.
If you want to go from an equatorial to a polar orbit (pretty extreme example, admittedly), you pretty much have to lose all that massive momentum along X (your original orbit) and gain as much momentum along Y (the one perpendicular to it). Remember that this is in space, so you can't just turn the rudder and turn. You have to literally fire a rocket backwards in your original orbit, to lose all the massive momentum and energy you had to gain to get in orbit in the first place, and a second perpendicular to it so you gain momentum in the other direction. Ok, so you can combine the two in one rocket fired at an angle, but that's still one hell of a lot of fuel. You just can't carry that much with you, because we're talking as much fuel as the rocket who put you up there in the first place. And an even bigger rocket to put you _and_ that fuel up there.
OK, that's a bit simplified, but should give a general idea.
Well, thank you for the compliment, but being intelligent doesn't mean automatically being qualified to judge something. You can have the best computer and algorithm in the world, if you lack the data to use it on, it'll still be not much use. And if you have garbage in, you still get garbage out.
What I'm trying to say is that while lawmakers often lack the understanding of all the finer points of technology, we merds often lack the other half of the data. Namely the social impact part and the "what would Joe Average want/need/expect" part. We tend to come up with all sorts of unfeasible "solutions", ranging from techno-utopian wishful thinking to equally utopian Mad-Max survival-of-the-fittest scenarios.
The black and white is that when someone steals you unlocked car, they are still depriving you of a car. If someone steals your unsecured recipes on your website, they aren't depriving you of anything, other than perhaps the revenue generated from them purchasing the recipes, if they would have bought them in the first place.
So basically the only real difference is the magnitude of the damage. I'll point out that IRL breaking into someone's house is still breaking and entering, regardless of whether you stole their computer or just read their diary. And it's still theft regardless of whether you stole a computer or swiped a 10$ bill.
Sure, there'll be a lot of grayscale in how and whether you get punished for it. That's why we have such distinctions as between grand larceny and petty theft. Both are theft, but we stuck an arbitrary sum of money as the arbitrary line between the two. But in the end, both are morally wrong.
In the case of computers, I'll take the RL analogy once again: this is my house's door, you're not supposed to be past this point unless you're invited and it's with my knowledge all the time. And if I ask you to leave, you're supposed to leave. This is my computer, you're not supposed to be anywhere on it that I didn't give you a link to. You're not supposed to run anything on it, unless I know about it, it's with my (explicit or reasonably implied) permission, and it better _fully_ uninstall itself when I no longer want it. Not that complicated a concept, really.
As I was saying, there is a lot of greyscale in how and whether we punish something, but the moral line is where you deliberately did what a reasonable human should have known he's not expected to do. If you're past that line, maybe you're not outright a criminal, maybe you're not elligible for a prison sentence, but at the very least you're an asshole.
That said, if you're really that curious what I think about your scenarios, here goes:
but what if he hadn't made it self replicating?
It depends on what and how exactly it would do. As a rule of thumb, if it executes anything on my computer without my knowledge (or on MySpace's computers without their knowledge), and which isn't what a reasonable human would expect on a web site, it's morally wrong.
What if it just made everyone that visited his page a friend?
If it's something you could have done yourself manually, it's ok. I don't know how their friend adding process works. If you can add someone without their consent anyway, then you're free to do it with a script too. If normally they'd have to consent, then using an exploit to bypass that is not ok.
What if I'm visiting a web page that sells recipes and they give you a link to/recipes/45.html and/recipes/354.html as examples, then I type in/recipes/1.html thru/recipes/999.html and print out all the recipes without paying them?
I'm guessing I don't have to comment much on that. You probably already see how you're basically taking something you're not supposed to. It may not be a grand feat of hacking, it may not be a monumental sum of money, but it's still very much like swipin
I'll mostly aggree about the other points, but I'm not sure what the point about children dying and the highways is. We're not talking in the cities, we're not even talking fast roads as such, we're talking major highways surrounded by at least fences and usually walls (against noise) too in the urban areas. To actually get onto a highway, a kid would have to walk quite a bit from wherever their home is, and climb over / crawl under a fence. I'm not even aware of that ever happening. Even if I might have missed a case somewhere along the road, it's hardly reason to plan traffic around such an unlikely scenario.
Also, if we're talking car-crazy, I'd like to say that at least Germany is designed to at least _allow_ one to not have a car, pretty much anywhere they may live. Compare it to USA suburban areas where in most cases you can't even walk even if you wanted to. Not only there are sidewalks everywhere, there's also good public transportation everywhere, and most places have supermarkets every 1 km or less. (As opposed to concentrating everything in some mall outside the town that's not even practical or in some cases possible to reach without a car.) So if you want to walk or take a bus instead, at least you _can_. I actually have (well paid) co-workers who come by bus, and at least one refuses to have a car and supposedly burned his driver's license as a protest against something or another.
Also the suburbia craze hasn't hit here half as hard as in the USA, where the American dream seems to be that if you're white and even vaguely countable as middle class, you have to move somewhere away from other people in some place reachable only by car. I suppose that not having much of an inner-city crime problem also helps with that. Most of my co-workers (again, well-paid and including some managers) actually like living in a populated place, on account of being more a more social thing. Which again tends to create somewhat less reason for a car exodus daily. Not that there isn't one, but it could be worse, you know?
Traffic congestions are a problem in some places, but then that's a problem in most of the western world. Cars in the 40's were still a luxury, so noone assumed we'd end up having _this_ many when they planned the cities. Short of demolishing half the city again and rebuilding it with wider roads, there's not that horribly much one can do. People aren't going to just give up their cars in Germany, but then again they aren't going to give up their cars in the USA either. And I was just reading a few days ago about Turkey having a traffic problem too, and a proposal to forbid more than one car per family in Istanbul. The Turks weren't happy about that idea, either. So that problem pretty much isn't a Germany-only problem by any kind of reckoning.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but the CNN article doesn't say he visited a porn site. It says that he visited an Internet chat room, supposedly for some kind of sexual gratification. (So at worst he "cybersexed" someone, at worst it could have been just as well an IRC channel for something else (there are channels for everything, including network administration, games, etc) and some idiot PHB applied an "IRC is for evil hackers and porn" preconception. We probably won't know which, as there are compelling arguments for both: the boss maybe isn't that stupid, but then some employees are smart enough to not connect to sexnet on the company computer too.)
Anyway, keywords: chat room.
Now I'm not advocating mis-use of the employer's resources, but let me also say: there was nothing for someone else to see on his screen either way. It's just a rectangular window with some text in it, not some big picture with a woman taking it up the rear end. To even see what he's chatting there, you'd have to pretty much go and read over his shoulder. And he can close the window long before you even figure out what's really going on in that chat. So the whole "oh, the humanity, someone could have seen it on his screen" argument just doesn't apply here, sorry.
And that is, again, why I wonder about the whole thing. Short of using a keylogger or other spyware, how can you tell that someone is on a chat-room/IRC for sex or not? You can't just see it on their screen, normally. I doubt that he just left the window open and continued blissfully cybering with the boss around reading over his shoulder. I doubt that he was caught with his pants down and his dick in his hand, or anything as clearly cut. Basically likely all they knew is that he's on a chat room.
So again, I'm not advocating mis-use of the employer's resources, but firing someone for "porn surfing" in a situation like that _may_ be just an undeserved insult.
Well, we can aggree pretty quickly about most of what you wrote there, since it's insightful and partially common sense.
But in that message I was talking about really the monomyth structure of the game's story, not about the grind. UT for example may have "grind", if that's how you choose to play it, but doesn't have a monomyth structure as far as I can tell. (Not having a story as such anyway, for a start.) You can "grind" Everquest or WOW, and certainly a lot of people do, but neither really has an actual monomyth story, or not in any major way. Especially if you just grind it, chances are you wouldn't notice even a vague resemblance.
What I'm talking about are games which are strongly story-based, and base that story on the hero's journey. In (real) CRPGs the story is a lot more central a point than in UT, and a lot of what you do in a game isn't just grind for better equipment, it's basically a device to give you the next bit of story. And you can notice when you do stuff for no other reason than to goad and herd you along the monomyth path. It's not even grinding anything (xp, rank, equipment, whatever), it's just being forced for example to do mundane stuff to show you that your character starts as an ordinary everyday Joe.
If you're familiar with UT, imagine first being forced to endure half an hour of running around doing the dishes and taking out the trash around the house, just to show you that your character was once a peaceful father in the suburbs, before becoming an arena champion. Imagine it's stuff that doesn't even help you with your grind or rankings. In fact, it happens before you can even get into the arena and get your first kill, to get you started on your way to playing with the champions. It's just there to force-feed you a superfluous prescribed step of the monomyth. You probably wouldn't put up with it in UT, would you? Well, we often have to put up with just that in some RPGs. (Some, not all. Others do use that time as a tutorial, though.) That's what I'm talking about.
And it's not retroactively applying narrative theory to it. Hollywood for example doesn't just accidentally rehash stories that just happen look like the hero's journey. Actually, they actively write their scripts to that recipe. At some point in the past someone, I forget who at this hour, circulated a study on the hero's journey around at Hollywood, and a group of producers bought it big time and made it the inofficial movie recipe. Base your script on this exact recipe or take a hike. And that was pretty much the moment any other kind of narrative died in North American cinematography.
Now I'm not sure if game designers/publishers actually have a requirement to follow the monomyth or take a hike. But it's hard not to notice when you're beat upside the head with it the 100'th time.
So basically, in the end you just illustrate exactly what I was saying: in WoW you start more powerful (compared to equal level mobs) at level 1 than you'll be at level 70. Yes, you'll still be relatively uber for 20 levels, and then it will actually go slightly downwards. That was all the point I was making. (Funny the things you can discover if you have the attention span and mental agility to read more than 3 rows before jumping in to do your own ego masturbation and call people fanboys.)
There seems to be this mis-conception that "character progression" in an RPG must be the exact opposite of WoW. That you _must_ start too wimpy to even kill a level 1 kobold, and must progress to being a walking nuke at level 20 (or 60 or 100 or whatever) that can wipe out several armies of level equal level NPCs. That at level 1 you must be so wimpy that even a kitten can maul you, and you can't even do more than run petty erands for random villagers. That being useless and bored at level 1 is somehow a condition to feeling great later.
And that just isn't set in stone. The most successful MMO goes exactly the opposite way around. You start powerful, and, yes, as you did notice, it actually goes downhill. Compared to the equal level NPCs, at level 20 you're less tough than you were at level 1, at level 40 you're less tough than at level 20 (and now you have a horse, but spend even more time on the road than at level 20), and at level 60 you need 40 people to do anything.
That said,
If you got yourself into only mindlessly caring about levels and equipment, I can see how it got boring. A lot of people seem to have this... silly idea, that somehow it's some race against the clock to level 60, that they must work day and night and never care for more than getting one level closer to that precious deadline. In the process, they miss the whole actual game that is there between levels 1 and 59, because instead of playing it and taking the momentary rewards and achievements for what they are, they were grinding to reach 60.
As some friendly advice, either quit the game completely or try to stop and smell the roses. Enjoy the game for what it is right there and then. If you're level 21, enjoy being level 21 for now. Sure, maybe that new level 20 weapon won't last you more than until level 25. But enjoy it while it lasts. Take it for what it is now, not throught the shit-coloured goggles of "argh, must grind to the max level, and this won't last until level 60". Be glad you got it as it is. Take some time to explore. Take some time to make some friends.
Yes, WoW isn't perfect by any measure, and it does go downhill. But that's no reason to make your stay even shittier, if you decided to stay anyway.
The game doesn't start with the level 60 raids. That's what happened (before BC) after the game was already ended. They were an unholy grind for people who just didn't know when to quit. WoW didn't have them initially, so people reached level 60 and started whining that there's no more content. The game, as originally designed, had already ended. Finish. Curtain fell. End game. Some people just didn't accept that. The grind/raid instances were added to give them something to do, pointless and unrewarding as it was. But at any rate, that wasn't the meat of the game. The _real_ game was levels 1 to 59.
And that's what all those "argh, must grind to max level fast" people are missing: the whole actual game. There are a lot of smaller achievements between levels 1 and 59. Enjoy them for what they are. If you just play through the game with the
Well, now whether a game's story is also _good_, that's another story. Very few game designers are also, well, good novelists and playwrights. And if you want an _original_ story too, well, now that's gonna be a problem to even get a publisher for. The PC games world is _very_ risk-adverse lately, so anything non-standard has an uphill battle against the cliched stuff that's already known to sell.
So on the whole, I'll mostly say "amen" to all you've said there.
Still, if that's what's available, I'll take a mediocre cliched story insted of no story.
Well, see, the funny thing is that _the_ most successful MMORPG (it has RPG in the name at least) is exactly what you describe as "non-fun". And funnily it has over 90% of the MMO market. So most people actually find that fun, eh?
The thing is, in WoW, you may be level 1, but you start massively "uber" compared to similar level enemies. The wolves and kobolds in Northshire do 1 hp per attack, ffs. Not 1d6 or anything. Just 1 to 1. You have massive hp for your level, you hit several _times_ harder than any enemy, your hp regens right back in no time (which is why so few people appreciate a Paladin or Priest early), travel times are short, your equipment is perfectly adequate without any grinding or farming, etc. The only way to die even if you wanted to is to herd a small army of enemies or jump off Teldrassil if you're an elf. _Totally_ uber.
You'll even get your first non-soloable boss at all at level 10 or so. (Hogger, if you're a human, different ones for the others.) Until then, you're _the_ uber-soldier that can mow down NPCs left and right with impunity.
You're in some ways more uber than you'll be at level 70. You'll need damn good equipment to be uber at level 70, while at level 1 you're uber even naked. In some ways your whole progression through WoW is struggling to hold onto that level 1 god-like power as the enemies grow faster than your base stats do. You even end up letting go of some of that power in some domains, to better hang on to it in other domains. (The choice of talent trees, for example.)
Guess what? It's fun if done right.
Look, level and equipment progressions are good and motivating, but there's no reason to be dumb about it. Which is what a lot of game designers are.
Yes, you grow up in levels/spells/equipment, but so do the enemies. _That_ is the motivator in gaining levels. But against equal level enemies you can do well from day 1 and it _will_ be fun. Starting level 1 does _not_ mean you have to start an unsurvivable peasant against level 1 enemies. It just means you won't kill any level 20s for now, but against level 1 enemies you can still be as powerful as you want to.
I'm not saying I should start level 100 with a nuke. But my level 1 mage should still be perfectly able to kill a level 1 rat or kobold or whatever your game is all about. My level 1 modern soldier should be able to draw that pistol or M-16 he's been trained to use, and actually shoot a level 1 enemy. My level 1 padawan in a SW setting should be perfectly able to kill a level 1 Greedo, if he picks on me instead of Han. Etc. There is simply no bloody reason why, at _any_ point in the game, I shouldn't be able to put up a good fight against an _equal_ level enemy.
It also doesn't mean you have to start doing boring mundane stuff like rescuing kittens from trees and picking apples in the garden.
Nah, D&D isn't the culprit. Look, it's not about starting with a nuke spell and a vorpal sword, it's about starting doing boring, stupid, mundane, unimporting things like catching flies for your sister's collection or returning books to the library. There's nothing in D&D to enforce that. You could start a level 1 with a kitchen knife in D&D and still be right in the middle of something extremely important, if your GM had imagination.
The real culprit is the thrice-accursed Monomyth a.k.a. The Hero's Journey script that we got in video games via Hollywood. (Yes, if you thought 90% of what Hollywood produces is the exact same script with different props and details, you'd be right: it _is_ the same rehashed script.)
That script requires certain steps. You must start with an everyman character (Joe Average, basically) doing mundane things, that the viewer can empathise with. You don't even give him his goal until the middle of the story. Etc.
Now that by itself gets boring when I have seen the exact same script 100 times before in a movie, or in a game. But in a game the problems are just starting:
1. Who's doing it? In a movie I'm leaning back and just watching the hero do those mundane things for a while, and that's ok. In a game I'm required to actually do them. It's a bigger turn off. Sorry, that's not what I bought a game for. If I wanted to experience my barbarian's life as a peasant before the big life-changing events, I'd go back to playing Harvest Moon.
Now I'm not saying there should be only combat, far from it, but spare me the meaningless "see, as you start as an average joe" chores. Make it important. If it's just the "you started as a peasant" intro, then make it the FMV intro to the game and let me at the controls when I have something finally important to achieve. I'm not saying it should be the final goal from the start either. Just _something_ important.
FF7 for example got this right: you start as a mercenary in the middle of a mission to blow up a power plant. It's not the final goal, so it doesnt spoil story progression. But it's not boring, mundane and uninteresting either. You're someone, you're (supposedly) the trained professional these guys hired, and you're doing something fitting your (supposed) qualification and worth your fee. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
2. Time involved? In a 90 minute movie, the mundane intro parts are maybe 15 minutes. In an 18 hour game that would proportionally be 3 hours. Thankfully nowadays most game designers do drastically shorten it too, but there _are_ clueless attempts at applying the monomyth to the letter. Even if it means 3 hours worth of running around returning library books and lost puppies. Frankly, if 15 minutes are enough to introduce the characters in a movie, they're enough in a game too. There's no need to scale everything equally.
3. Does it even serve the same purpose? A movie is watched mostly in one go. A game isn't. Even _if_ that intro part served some purpose in a movie, for the transition between mundane and the movie world, that is lost in a game as soon as I save now and reload the next day. The next day I start directly in the middle of it without any such transition.
And frankly, by now we have plenty of evidence that it actually works perfectly without such transitions. There is no massive problem suspending disbelief when you reload directly in the middle of the plot. So why do we need it in the beginning anyway?
4. Scaling and time again. The monomyth taken literally is ok for a 3 hour story, but not for a 30 hour game. Building up linearly to the climax in 20 hours and coming down in 10 is boring. Even novels use multiple interwoven plots to keep it interesting over long periods of time.
There was this unsavoury comparing a good video game plot to multiple female orgasms, with plateaus and peaks all over the plac
Nope, it wasn't even the BSA, it was the Russian state suing this guy all along. It was a criminal, not a civil case.
Gorbachev just used this case to get some free publicity as some kind of Defender Of The Russian People, but his letter to Bill Gates was as irrelevant as it could possibly get for this case. There were no charges that MS could _possibly_ drop, since MS (or BSA) had not pressed any charges against him to start with. It's that simple.
The only moment I know of when MS was in any way even contacted by the Russian authorities about this case was when the Russians offered this teacher a weird "we'll let you go if you apologize nicely to MS" bargain. AFAIK, MS actually accepted that, but the teacher refused and preferred to go to trial.
Honestly, I'm disappointe to heck and back in Slashdot's coverage of this. Even by bleating zealot standards, this is stupid. God knows there's enough to complain about MS, there's no reason to dillute it with falsehoods and whines. I'd rather that people would get the real message loud and clear about what MS _does_ do wrong, than leave a general impression of just having a bunch of incoherent whiners against it. The former might change people's minds, the latter will even get MS sympathy.
I'm playing strategy games too, so I see your point. Yes, there is a certain similarity in play styles that I like.
But what I want in an RPG, primarily, is, well, to be told a good story. And preferrably not just a quick update while the next combat map loads. Call it an interactive novel, if you will. So switching to strategy games is not exactly an apples-to-apples substitute there. Having solid strategy/tactical mechanics in combat is very much appreciated and important to me, don't get me wrong, but in an RPG they're the means not the end.
To go on a tangent of an example: It's sorta like having nice weapons in a FPS, if you will: those weapons are tools to an end, not the end itself. It's nice (maybe even expected and essential nowadays) to have good, well balanced ones, but it's not the whole purpose of the game. But when I play a FPS, I expect FPS gameplay, not just a list of guns. Similarly when I play RPG, I primarily expect an RPG, not just the tactics part.
And therein lies a double disappointment for me these days:
1. A lot of "RPGs" _are_ dumbed down to having even less story than a strategy game. Sure, that's not the case with some top titles like Oblivion or NWN2, but there's a whole army of hack-and-slash and Diablo clones which only have at most a few one-liners between battle maps as the whole story. Not only they're mindless click-fests _in_ combat, they're made for the masses of illiterates who are proud that they don't read any more. (You know, the "if I wanted to read a story I'd read a book" kind, except he's never actually read a book since the school either.) There's very little story to be found in them, beyond the most minimalistic half-baked excuse to go shoot up (or slice up) the next map too.
2. It doesn't help that Turn-Based Strategy is an endangered species either. Even if I wanted to give up on RPG and go full-time strategy, how much choice do I have there? Sure, there's DIsgaea and a few others, but the keyword is: "few".
Which is irrelevant to this case too. We're not talking some security researcher who disclosed a security vulnerability, nor even cracked some DRM, but about someone who allegedly pirated some programs. I'm willing to bet that there was exactly zero research involved.
Sorry, but... Here I'll call outright bullshit. Sorry, this is _not_ about "let's use F/OSS instead of closed source", it's about using pirated closed source programs. If they wanted to support F/OSS, they could have done so, but no, they wanted to keep using Windows for free. There's a freakin' huge difference there.
And spare me the emotional parts about trust, please. So they can trust closed source if it's pirated? Does Windows become more open if you use a pirated serial number? Does Office save its files in a less proprietary format just because it's on a CD-R? WTF?
There _are_ good arguments for trusting F/OSS instead of closed source programs and proprietary formats. That senator from IIRC Peru made a damn good case for example. But this case isn't it. It's plain and simple about pirating closed source programs. If you will, it's exactly the _opposite_: these guys decided that they can trust MS and closed source all right, they just don't want to pay.
Step out of the "yay, they stuck it to MS" mentality a little, and you may see that there's little to celebrate. There would have been ways to make a pro-OSS or anti-closed-source point, but that was not what happened here. They just gave a vote of confidence to MS, if anything. Price being equal (free as in beer, even if by virtue of being stolen beer) they just decided they'd rather use Windows.
And, without going into your other points in detail, for the people of Russia I see even less to celebrate in this mockery of justice. It just shows that the whole country, including prominent figures like Gorbachev and (scarily enough) their president Putin, just can't wrap their head around such notions as "rule of the law". They're still stuck in the soviet era mentality, where "justice" is something based on scapegoats, favoritism, nepotism and rich powerful guys punishing the little guys they don't like. E.g., Gorbachev just showed that he has no freakin' clue what's the difference between a criminal case and Bill Gates persecuting a poor teacher.
If that's the kind of politicians and mentality that Russia still has, then I feel genuinely sorry for those people.
I'd see your point if he was tried for a patent violation, or any other kind of stealing an _idea_. But he pirated a product. It's the difference between copying the suspension idea for a Ferrari and breaking into a Ferrary for a joy ride. It's not even remotely the same thing.
Plus, MS until _very_ recently didn't even bother much with patents, and I still don't know of any case when they sued someone for patent infringements. And then mostly started patenting stuff when they got sued for blindingly obvious patents. So from an idea exchange point of view, MS practices what it preaches, so to speak. Or at least certainly doesn't bother preaching against it either.
And before someone comes up with some lame "haha, but MS never innovated anything so they couldn't sue" slogan, actually they did come with new (if not spectacular) stuff, and at any rate bought other companies which did. So, you know, even if those guys didn't work for MS at the time when they invented that stuff, MS now owns their IP anyway. Not saying that it makes MS the great innovator, but they do own some original IP, even if by buying it. That's what I'm saying. So if they did try to block everything infringing on that IP, you'd see a _lot_ of (frivolous) litigation coming from Redmond.
To put it into perspective, other companies have litigated for as little as your app _looking_ like theirs. There were lawsuits coming out of Lotus like crazy against everyone with the menus at the bottom for example. If MS were to try to do that, ooer, you'd see some serious lawsuits against every sod who made a xine-based player that looks like Windows Media Player. Or Mono? Ooer. That would be some litigation potential. If you think that
Basically if this guy had stolen an idea from MS, like, I don't know, making an Aero-like window manager for KDE or Gnome, probably MS couldn't care less. (I know Aero is the bad example and not original, but bear with me. Replace it with implementing DirectX 10 in Wine, or implementing some new protocol as a kernel driver, or whatever else instead, if it makes you feel any better.)
But he didn't, he just pirated Windows. Which, frankly, I'm hard pressed to see as some great "revenge of the innovators" act, in any form or shape.
Well, at least you admit it. That's something
Disclaimer: Now I'm _not_ a F/OSS zealot usually, and probably half the /. crowd would normally find me leaning towards the MS side. Heck, by /. standards I've even been accused of being a MS fanboy before, although God knows it's not hard to get called that here. But in this case I find it sad and counter-productive for F/OSS too.
Yes, _if_ he had used GPL software, all that would have happened. Except he didn't use OSS, he just went and pirated Windows instead. And the whole case just created a precedent for that too. There are millions of computers in Russia which could have a financial incentive to use some free (at least as in beer) software instead or some cheap local software. Now they'll keep using a pirated version of Windows instead. Congrats.
All piracy helps kill isn't the big software houses, but they help kill their small competitors. Piracy didn't kill MS Office, but it helped nearly kill Star Office and the horde of smaller options that used to exist. Sure, they missed 90% of the Office features that 90% of the population never needed, but they would have been plenty enough and cheap for writing a recipe or a CV in. If the option really were "do I get MS Office for a shitload of money, or Someone1234 Write for very little money, or KWrite for free", the second and third options would look a lot more viable. But when the option becomes "I can copy all them for free, so do I get MS Office or Someone1234 Write or KWrite", the choice also becomes "WTF, let's get MS Office then."
People don't all drive Ferraris, so some go buy a modest small car instead, because they can't pirate a car. So a lot more options exist. In the software world they pirate the big thing, and let the smaller budget options die.
Worse yet, the illusion of ubiquitousness helped kill competition even further past some point. Let's all pirate Office at home because that's what we use at work too. And let's then all install Office at work, because, wth, everyone already knows how to use their pirated copy at home.
And what do you think that does to F/OSS in Russia too? There could have been local distros, small local companies maybe customizing it for schools or offering cheap tech support/installations, etc. There could have been kids learning to use KDE or Gnome instead of XP's shitty Fischer Price interface (unless you disable the fluff), and maybe having a look at the code, in those schools. Now they'll all grow on pirated Windows software, and continue to not even understand the "use the free choice, if you can't afford the behemoth" idea. Probably not even understanding why and how it would help to contribute some code to the free choice. Why would you bother when you know everyone will just pirate Windows instead? Way to go.
We mostly seem to aggree. The only thing I'd somewhat debate is the "They don't realize what they are doing to others" part. Most tend to realize very well what they're doing to others, and may be even entertained by it. What they don't realize is why on Earth would they really care about any damage done to others.
Well, as usual, I'd say don't just take the word of some random guy off Slashdot. Have a look at the APD list first if you want to be sure, and maybe ask a qualified psychiatrist.
That said, glad to be of service. You may have a nice way up the corporate pyramid ahead of if you are one. Corporations are expected to basically act like gigantic sociopaths, and unsurprisingly a lot of CEOs and such are sociopaths.
You have to remember that technology isn't composed just of the enthusiastic nerds developping it, but also of the morally-challenged marketeers selling half-baked technologies as the solution to all world's problems and then some. The nerd working on the recognition algorithm may well be aware of the limitations and need for improvement, but that doesn't ever stop the marketting team from selling something that's not even half-ready for RL use.
_If_ he's a sociopath (you can't diagnose that from just one message), it just doesn't work that way. You're making the usual mistake of assuming that all humans are essentially, well, equally human and you only need appeal to someone's humanity/feelings/moral-sense/flash-of-enlightenm
Sociopathy is, simply put, completely lacking the empathy and connection to other humans. It's being the only human in a single-player world full of generic NPCs. They're not your peers, they don't matter, their feelings don't matter, they're there just to be used, abused, manipulated, lied to, whatever gets you closer to your objectives.
Think of your relationship to NPCs in a computer game. Do you really care what that generic NPC in Oblivion or GTA feels or thinks? Do you care if he/she had a bad day, or if his/her kid is sick? Would you feel any sense of accomplishment of having him/her as a friend? Would you feel bad for clicking on a complete lie dialogue choice just to finish a quest? Would you even really think of them as a "he" or a "she", or more along the lines of "it"? I mean, don't be silly, it's just a game and just a scripted NPC. Right?
Well, in a nutshell that's the kind of world that a sociopath lives in. You can't even be seen as a friend by one. You're at most a sucker to be used for a purpose, even if that purpose is a few minutes of entertainment.
So expecting that one would wake up one day and think "man, I wasted my life, I should have made friends" is naive. That's the kind of notion that doesn't even compute in their world. Or not for the same meaning of "friend" that you'd use.
The worse problem, when you think about it, is the number of persons that are going to be scanned.
E.g., let's say you stick this in an airport, and give it an insane resolution camera. You want to identify suspects quickly in a crowd, right? So if this thing is this good at scanning people without even having them look in a gizmo, better batch scan any iris that has enough pixels on that camera, right?
The problem there is that there'll be maybe a thousand people in any place in the airport at a time, so around 10 of them will be falsely identified. That's just in one scanning everyone in the room.
Now think the hundreds of thousands of people moved by a reasonable airport daily, their families coming with them to the airport, etc. Oooer. Now that's some serious false positives.
Multiply this by a a generous number of cameras scattered all over the place. A 1 false match in 100 scans pretty much means just that: if you take the same person and walk him past 100 cameras, on the average 1 of them will identify him as someone else. Stick enough of these cameras on an airport, and everyone will get at least one false match by just walking from one gate to another, maybe with a detour to the toilet/bar/whatever.
And I don't even want to think of the janitors, security guards, airline personnel, etc. Those are going to get scanned again and again thousands of times a day, producing anywhere between tens and hundreds of false matches each.
Basically: think of the worst "the Pope, Bush and Osama walk onto a plane" joke and a camera somewhere will produce exactly that kind of false match. Daily.
Now for the second problem: picture being placed somewhere at the scene of a crime by such a false match. 99% accuracy sounds just about guaranteed to have been you to the average jurror.
You're making the assumption that "if noone patented it, noone thought about it", which is, sad to say, bogus. Some people just don't run to the patent office for each and single triviality.
In this case, for example, there I can remember at least two cases of phones built just like that. One even made it all the way to being marketted. (Dunno if it actually sold or not, though.) So, yes, other people "skilled in the art" _did_ think of it before. Go figure.
The problem there stems from the fact that this seems to be little more than a pixel counter. I.e., to measure something you'd have had to stick the label on it and to have taken a nice full frontal picture of it.
So the way I see it, if you remembered to do that, then you pretty much remembered to measure it in the first place. If you didn't, well, you're going to go back anyway.
And if it shows up at the right angle in the picture of something else you did measure, then it doesn't do anything you couldn't have done with any graphics editing program. (E.g., Gimp as a free one.) You don't even need a CAD program. If it shows you the pixel coordinates of the mouse pointer, there you go: measure the known object in pixels(the difference between the coordinates at one end and the ones at the other end), measure the unknown object in pixels, do some elementary maths. You'll have the same accuracy this thing has.
Or disable the depth blur. I still remember going back to COH after the I6 or I7 patch hit, can't really remember which. So they've added all these nice detailed textures everywhere, bumpmapping and... wtf... anything farther than 100 ft or so looks like smeared crap. Like a bubblejet printed picture left out in the rain. Then I turn off the new depth blur option and everything's sharp again.
So, yeah, if you find yourself having a bad case of myopia IRL, look for that setting in the options.
Kidding aside, that's one thing that... makes me seriously wonder, to say the least. More than a decade of hardware acceleration, billions of R&D dollars spent on making cards powerful enough for 16x anisotropy and 6x FSAA in 1600x1200, more texture memory and bandwidth than you can shake a DMA at, and... we use it to make it all look blurry and shitty like it's 1991 again. Who comes up with this kind of ideas anyway?
From what I can tell, Novell is just playing it safe.
The fact is: there's a lot of GPL-ed code out there that _is_, in fact, encumbered by IP problems as it is. If you want to be free of any patents or other IP issues, then for example I hope you're not using or distributing an MP3 player or DVD player.
And for a while that's just what Novell did. E.g., one of my annoyances with SuSE 10.0 (which is the one I'm using) is that they removed all MP3 codecs, all DVD decoding, etc. They actually crippled their version Xine to no longer play DVDs, and Kaffeine to display a message saying it won't play DVDs for legal reasons. They have an XMMS version that won't play MP3's. (How stupid is that?) Etc. I have a whole Multimedia group in the Applications menu that won't, in fact, play 90% of the media out there.
The problem is that such a system isn't very useful outside a small (compared to the OS market size) community of nerds. It's a great system for writing code on, but, well, you better be comfortable with downloading and compiling anything media related yourself if you want to actually have a usable home computer. You and I may be, but Joe Average isn't. And even I find it stupid. It's not just the extra inconvenience of having to download and compile that stuff myself, it also shifted a chunk of responsibility upon me for doing so. _If_ there's some actual IP problem there, I just lost that "your honour, I have no idea, it just came with the distro" excuse.
Now I don't know if there are actual legal problems there or Novell's managers are just paranoid. I'm not a lawyer. But I can't really blame them, because they are a big target. And have been under active underhanded attack from MS before, more than once. MS actively killed both DR DOS _and_ an attempt by Novell to offer their own alternative to using MS's servers for workstation logins. (Callous as it may sound, MS just informed Novell that if they ship something like that, MS _will_ break it. And they did. Repeatedly. MS just changed the undocumented APIs to keep making Novell's client no longer work.)
So as far as I can tell, they went and bought some patent protection at least from MS. Maybe they even signed off their soul, future and firstborn in the process. (Companies who make too tight deals with MS tend to end up dead in the long run, somehow.) But in the end it's just business as usual in corporate land. I find it hard to believe that they'd even bother with some anti-GPL conspiracy there. Most corporations don't fight crusades, anti-GPL or otherwise. Even MS wouldn't really give a damn if it wasn't a direct competition issue. Most other people don't really give a damn one way or another. They just cover their asses. Which includes that they also don't make grand last stand to make an anti-patent point. Not only they'd get buried in lawsuits, some from their own investors, they'd even lose other corporate clients who also don't want to be martyrs in an anti-patent crusade.
No, you're missing the point. Tirades about freedom are good and fine, but at some point "toe the party line and shut up" clauses are the exact opposite of freedom any way you want to slice it. Freedom is about people, not about code, not about computers. The moment you start restricting what whole businesses are supposed to do -- and not even with the code, but generally what deals they can make, what IP they can have, what software (even unrelated to your code) they're allowed to write -- you've lost the whole plot completely. You're proposing... what? That you can dictate what others can and can't do, in the name of _freedom_? Heh. Oh, the irony.
The comparison with banana republic dictatorships was there for a reason. Those people ended up losing their basic freedoms in the name of some supposed "workers' democracy" or "freedom" rhetoric too. You start by fighting some actual colonial oppressors, which has a moral and ethical justification all right. But then all of a sudden you're not allowed to even talk to anyone from outside anymore, (supposedly) just to be sure that noone betrays state secrets to the foreign colonialists and imperialists. Suddenly you need the Party's approval to even travel abroad, because you could be recruited by those hostile colonial/imperialist powers there. You need the Party's approval to even start or be a manager in a company, because it could cooperate with those hostile colonial/imperialist powers. Etc. In effect they just replaced one opressor with an even worse oppressor, and in the name of defeating one enemy just lost even more rights and freedoms.
But to return to the topic: if suddenly the GPL is about idealist crusades against the very notions of IP, closed source, etc, (as opposed to being just a license as to what can I do with the code, as is the case now) so my benefit from that crusade is... what, then? No, not generic "but your code/files/etc stay free!!!" ideology, but actual benefits. So I gain some great freedom for my code, at the expense that suddenly someone else is in charge of what business models I can use, what programs can I write, what can I patent, who can I make deals with, etc?
Sorry to break it to you, but Microsoft's gives me a better deal there, as freedoms go. Sure, I don't get their code, and supposedly some day they could even *gasp* change their XML formats so I need an XSLT to convert my Office files, etc. On the other hand, they never claimed any right to tell me what to do in any other aspect. So I lose some freedom of the code/data, but keep my basic rights as a human instead of being a slave to someone's crusader army. Sounds like a _great_ deal to me.
Also, here's an idea. You know, from a user of open source software, by your distinction. Instead of being on some black-and-white crusade about what _could_ happen in some alternate worst-case-scenario ultra-slippery-slope universe, maybe take the time to analyze what happens here and now. Some things are not actually the Antichrist and embodiment of ultimate evil. A lot of things are, at best, an inconvenience. Sure, it's nice to be able to avoid them, but I'm _not_ going to sell myself into indentured servitude to some rebel army just to avoid a milder inconvenience that _could_ happen sometime in the future.
E.g., maybe the OOo XML is a better XML format than Office's, for example, but in the end the worst that can happen is that I need to spend a couple of hours (heck, let's even say days, or even weeks) writing an XSLT to convert between them. Even with a binary format, heck, worst that can happen is that I need to buy a new Office version and write a small VB script that loads the old files and exports them to another format. It's not some great loss of liberties, it's an inconvenience. It would be nice to not have it, but it's not the end of the world. As I was saying, I'm _not_ going to give up other freedoms just to avoid _that_ kind of minor pain in the butt scenario. If the price to keep my files free of Microsoft's "tyrany" is to, basically,
Well, now that would be a great way for OSS to shoot itself in the foot. "Here, we'll give you some ideological crusade disguised as a license, and we can revoke it at any time for as little as making a deal with a corporation we don't like, or having more patents than we like, or also distributing some closed source programs we don't like, or simply because we've had a bad day and don't like you any more." Dunno about Novell, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of companies would drop Linux like a hot potato. Heck, I would, and I'm writing this in Linux.
The thing is, the whole thing doesn't even have a moral high ground any more if it tries to rule with an iron fist over anything else you might do, including business relations, deals, IP, God-knows-what-else. I mean, wth, if MS even hinted at including a "we can revoke your license if you make deals with companies we don't personally approve of" clause in their EULA, everyone would be screaming bloody murder. Yet here we are talking about, basically, "let's change the GPL so we can punish Novel for making a deal with MS", as if it was some righteous thing to do. WTF?
The very idea of sneaking in some sort of "thou shalt not make deals with MS" or generally "though shalt toe the party line" in the name of "freedom of speech" rethoric is... bizarre, to say the least. If ESR and RMS have freedom so dear (and you'd think so given all the rants about how the GPL is all about your freedom), then the advice that comes to mind is to actually respect it, and I don't mean just for code. Freedom means just that: being free to do whatever the heck you like. Including dealing with MS, writing/installing/distributing a binary-only module, or whatever. As long as I'm _not_ in fact suppressing your coding freedoms, have the decency to not try to suppress my (other) freedoms either.
Honestly, the whole idea is reminiscent of some of the worst crops of banana-republic dictatorships. Start by fighting some colonial/imperialist/whatever oppressor, and end up with less freedoms than you had under the old colonial oppressors.
The problem there is that that junk moves very very fast. In fact, so fast that it makes anti-tank sabot rounds seem like sedated snails by comparison. At the speeds involved, even for the tiniest such objects the energy and momentum are nuts. IIRC in the 80's a speck of paint dented the space shuttle's windshield. The larger objects that can be tracked, well, now _those_ pack quite the punch.
So, well, how are you going to collect them? You'd pretty much either need to send a tank into orbit, or very very precisely match orbit with each and every single such thing to collect it. The problem is that the latter can be an even more expensive exercise than the former. You either launch a ship for each such piece of debris, or need a helluva lot of fuel to switch orbits if you want to pick one at a time without coming back each time.
If you want to go from an equatorial to a polar orbit (pretty extreme example, admittedly), you pretty much have to lose all that massive momentum along X (your original orbit) and gain as much momentum along Y (the one perpendicular to it). Remember that this is in space, so you can't just turn the rudder and turn. You have to literally fire a rocket backwards in your original orbit, to lose all the massive momentum and energy you had to gain to get in orbit in the first place, and a second perpendicular to it so you gain momentum in the other direction. Ok, so you can combine the two in one rocket fired at an angle, but that's still one hell of a lot of fuel. You just can't carry that much with you, because we're talking as much fuel as the rocket who put you up there in the first place. And an even bigger rocket to put you _and_ that fuel up there.
OK, that's a bit simplified, but should give a general idea.
What I'm trying to say is that while lawmakers often lack the understanding of all the finer points of technology, we merds often lack the other half of the data. Namely the social impact part and the "what would Joe Average want/need/expect" part. We tend to come up with all sorts of unfeasible "solutions", ranging from techno-utopian wishful thinking to equally utopian Mad-Max survival-of-the-fittest scenarios.
So basically the only real difference is the magnitude of the damage. I'll point out that IRL breaking into someone's house is still breaking and entering, regardless of whether you stole their computer or just read their diary. And it's still theft regardless of whether you stole a computer or swiped a 10$ bill.
Sure, there'll be a lot of grayscale in how and whether you get punished for it. That's why we have such distinctions as between grand larceny and petty theft. Both are theft, but we stuck an arbitrary sum of money as the arbitrary line between the two. But in the end, both are morally wrong.
In the case of computers, I'll take the RL analogy once again: this is my house's door, you're not supposed to be past this point unless you're invited and it's with my knowledge all the time. And if I ask you to leave, you're supposed to leave. This is my computer, you're not supposed to be anywhere on it that I didn't give you a link to. You're not supposed to run anything on it, unless I know about it, it's with my (explicit or reasonably implied) permission, and it better _fully_ uninstall itself when I no longer want it. Not that complicated a concept, really.
As I was saying, there is a lot of greyscale in how and whether we punish something, but the moral line is where you deliberately did what a reasonable human should have known he's not expected to do. If you're past that line, maybe you're not outright a criminal, maybe you're not elligible for a prison sentence, but at the very least you're an asshole.
That said, if you're really that curious what I think about your scenarios, here goes:
It depends on what and how exactly it would do. As a rule of thumb, if it executes anything on my computer without my knowledge (or on MySpace's computers without their knowledge), and which isn't what a reasonable human would expect on a web site, it's morally wrong.
If it's something you could have done yourself manually, it's ok. I don't know how their friend adding process works. If you can add someone without their consent anyway, then you're free to do it with a script too. If normally they'd have to consent, then using an exploit to bypass that is not ok.
I'm guessing I don't have to comment much on that. You probably already see how you're basically taking something you're not supposed to. It may not be a grand feat of hacking, it may not be a monumental sum of money, but it's still very much like swipin
I'll mostly aggree about the other points, but I'm not sure what the point about children dying and the highways is. We're not talking in the cities, we're not even talking fast roads as such, we're talking major highways surrounded by at least fences and usually walls (against noise) too in the urban areas. To actually get onto a highway, a kid would have to walk quite a bit from wherever their home is, and climb over / crawl under a fence. I'm not even aware of that ever happening. Even if I might have missed a case somewhere along the road, it's hardly reason to plan traffic around such an unlikely scenario.
Also, if we're talking car-crazy, I'd like to say that at least Germany is designed to at least _allow_ one to not have a car, pretty much anywhere they may live. Compare it to USA suburban areas where in most cases you can't even walk even if you wanted to. Not only there are sidewalks everywhere, there's also good public transportation everywhere, and most places have supermarkets every 1 km or less. (As opposed to concentrating everything in some mall outside the town that's not even practical or in some cases possible to reach without a car.) So if you want to walk or take a bus instead, at least you _can_. I actually have (well paid) co-workers who come by bus, and at least one refuses to have a car and supposedly burned his driver's license as a protest against something or another.
Also the suburbia craze hasn't hit here half as hard as in the USA, where the American dream seems to be that if you're white and even vaguely countable as middle class, you have to move somewhere away from other people in some place reachable only by car. I suppose that not having much of an inner-city crime problem also helps with that. Most of my co-workers (again, well-paid and including some managers) actually like living in a populated place, on account of being more a more social thing. Which again tends to create somewhat less reason for a car exodus daily. Not that there isn't one, but it could be worse, you know?
Traffic congestions are a problem in some places, but then that's a problem in most of the western world. Cars in the 40's were still a luxury, so noone assumed we'd end up having _this_ many when they planned the cities. Short of demolishing half the city again and rebuilding it with wider roads, there's not that horribly much one can do. People aren't going to just give up their cars in Germany, but then again they aren't going to give up their cars in the USA either. And I was just reading a few days ago about Turkey having a traffic problem too, and a proposal to forbid more than one car per family in Istanbul. The Turks weren't happy about that idea, either. So that problem pretty much isn't a Germany-only problem by any kind of reckoning.