there is quite a difference between insanity and being a (psycho|socio)path. The point of justice is not actually what you think it is, either. It's rehabilitation. Someone who is insane probably does not have an accurate view of reality - like in the example I listed earlier. Someone who goes around murdering people out of malice, knowing full well what he is doing is not necessarily insane, and certainly not by virtue of his actions by our legal definitons.
And that point about releasing people who are found not guilty by reason of insanity; I agree with you on this. The problem is that people who have recovered/leanred to live with their disorder under appropriate supervision/medication should be released. The fact of the matter is that people who have recovered - and I'll trust their evaluators on that fact - are not released as commonly as you probably would like to think. For this reason, I think that the issue deserves attention, respect, and sensativity.
Once again, sorry for bleating like a dying, clubbed baby seal, but I felt that I should add that although I don't have any links that I can think of right now DIRECTLY on the subject, I would like to direct you to a series of essays on kuro5hin.org, written by a man living with schizoaffective disorder. Although it probably won't change your viewpoints, perhaps upon reading about some of this guy's experiences, you'll have a building block to construct a more enlightened philosophy of justice and of mental disorder.
Forgive the sound of the dying giraffe, but I have to say that the insanity defense is no joke. NGRI is something under constant attack by people who don't really understand it.
Consider this: you are driving your car. you hit a baby, baby dies. You weren't driving particularly recklessly, under the speedlimit, visibility was just low. It's sad and it happens. Consider this: you are drunk, driving your car. And by drunk, I mean you are impaired. You aren't driving particularly recklessly, but the same thing as above happens.
Now, this doesn't apply to NGRI directly, but consider this: the circumstances around a crime impact the meaning of it. Both of those situations flat out suck, but the argument is that you were being especially irresponsible in the second case, but not in the first.
Let's say you are sane and you kill a guy named Sam. (Sorry, Sam.) He kicked your dog, and now you're going to pump his head full of lead and do some of that stuff out of the first scene of "Way of the Gun".
Now, consider case two: you are insane, and you believe that Jodie Foster is in love with you and tells you to do things, and you feel complied to do so. You are not even aware of your delusion, and the fact that you are having the delusion implies that a great deal of your judgement is impaired. In fact, you could say that you didn't know what you were doing - you can still remember doing them, but you thought you were killing the martian high leader of the invasion force or something. In this case, are you responsible for killing a man, or are you responsible for falling for a delusion, which to you seemed very, very real.
I argue that in this case, you are not guilty of the crime you are charged with because you frankly were not in control of your reality.
And ultimately, if you look up statistics on the defense, you'll find that it is hardly ever used, does not work when it should, and that the mean time spent incarcerated in mental hostpitals by NGRI people is higher than the mean time spent in prison for the same crime.
There is actually a famous case where a guy shot somebody very important under the compulsion of one of his delusionary characters and was found not guilty by reason of insanity, who is now sitting, treated, recovered, in a mental hospital, getting clean review after clean review and not being released by the board that controlls his release.
Whine as much as you want about the implications of this trojan defense, but don't equate it or compare it to the not guilty be reason of insanity defense. They are quite different.
Also, note that it *IS* possible that a trojan's job would be to search for child pornography on Kazaa or something. Ultimately it'll probably just pull up legit porn, but somebody COULD design such a program.
Now, granted that, the prosecution should have made a serious attempt to disprove the defendants claims. I suspect they did otherwise.
I have to agree with you on the subject of remorse. The fact of the matter is that Kevin Mitnick was held without trial so long that he was forced to plea bargain - quite possibly because the prosecution didn't believe it could build a strong enough case on Kevin.
The one who SHOULD be showing remorse here is his prosecutor, for abuse of law and violating the spirit of the justice system. Inadequate law enforcement training is good reason to get better training and become better at collecting evidence; it is NOT justification to extort individuals from having the trial that they are entitled to.
I think Kevin has been remarkably tactful in being so forgiving of what was done to him; maybe all the support behind him helped him with that, but I really think he's a strong individual. I don't think I ever could have recovered from the rape tactics of the prosecution. I would be an angry shell of a man, who lived to do nothing but show others how such a thing could happen. That Kevin bravely meets this kind of criticism all the time with strength and composure tells us a lot about his character. Regardless of his criminal background, I think we should look up to the kind of backbone he has displayed.
yeah... slack is a bit too hardcore for the masses. Going with an entry level distro is probably the way to go. Then, if you find that Redhat and Mandrake are your mortal enemies, give slack a try. That's the story of my life.:) Never been happier... though I hear Gentoo is tight...
It's an interesting analysis - I can't really fault you there. There is certainly that "feel" when you walk out of that movie, that the adventure was about recovering something lost, but I have to agree with previous posters that you might be reading a little too deeply. Then again; you may be completely right. I guess you'd have to ask the director/producer/script-writer, whatever.
okay, started it windowed this time. i think it has a problem switching from the "scrolling" curser (as you move the mouse to the edge of the screen to move the camera to other parts of the starmap) back to the original. Here's the error message, anyone else getting this one or something similar?
dariusMaster of Orion 3$ winex moo3.exe X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 93 (X_CreateCursor)
Serial number of failed request: 988
Current serial number in output stream: 995
got it working, mouse was invisible, moved over textbox, became visible. i crashed during turn 2 while moving the mouse around - all screens seem to work so far, so maybe it's a sound issue?
woohooo Okay, I uninstalled it, reinstalled it, included DX 8.1b and now it gets to the opening screen, though there's no mouse cursor. Anyone else got similar problems? (15 minutes later) Wahoo! Okay, the game looks sweet. The mouse cursor was invisible in the beggining for me, but after putting my mouse over a text box, it became a text cursor, which is a lot better than nothing. The game seemed to have no real problems after that until at the end of turn 2 (15 minutes later) I crashed. I'm using ALSA, gonna try switching drivers.
My problem initially was that I had a second drive configured in my.transgaming/config to a directory that didn't exist - when moo3 probed for it it died. try running winex -debugmsg +err moo3.exe to see what's going wrong. Of course, I've still got other problems: dariusMaster of Orion 3$ winex -debugmsg +err moo3.exe err:win32:_EnterSysLevel (0x4084d998, level 2): Holding 0x408ed9c4, level 3. Expect deadlock! fixme:ole:CoSetState (0x653b3758),stub! fixme:file:SetFileAttributesA (C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SIntf16.dll):100 attribute(s) not implemented. fixme:file:SetFileAttributesA (C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SIntf32.dll):100 attribute(s) not implemented. fixme:file:SetFileAttributesA (C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SIntfNT.dll):100 attribute(s) not implemented. fixme:aspi:TranslateASPI32Address (0xafef60, 0xb05104), stub ! fixme:aspi:SendASPI32Command ASPI: Partially implemented SC_HA_INQUIRY for adapter 0. fixme:ole:CoSetState ((nil)),stub!
Seriously - look at the MPAA - self regulating that stuff. There don't need any laws to make it happen.
The day that ebworld.com has to only sell to adults or people who can verify the age is the day I start helping 6 year olds get AdultPass'es or whatever sort of AVS the government will require.
grr.
Re:Why are we helping him build his business?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 1
Who said he had a social agenda?
The social agenda is mine. Nobody accused him of being a hero, but he is a symbol.
And social engineering still works, I'm afriad.
Re:Why are we helping him build his business?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 1
Why must he be a hero? He doesn't have to be, but the fact of the matter is this:
For every time you've sat in front of the computer at 4:30AM on IRC, programming, listening to music over Icecast, hacking kernel stuff, or just daydreaming about things you wish you could change in the world, hacking the world in your head, desparately wishing something out there could be different, for every time you see past the crap of the world and see what kind of attrocities are committed for the sake of power, or for the support of somebody's agenda...
or even for every time you reminisce about the way things used to be, or how much you miss your ex-girlfriends, or how you hate that your favorite author died so young...
If for nothing else, for that you should understand why Kevin Mitnick is someone who deserves our support.
The fact of the matter is this man has lost more time than you can imagine. He has lost it for his crimes, but his crimes are not crimes of malice.
For the way he was treated and for the time he has lost, and for the way that our society treats those who have run afoul with the law, this guy deserves your support. If you can't feel compassion, feel guilt: this is your world too, and through inaction, you have helped create it.
When you grow your bitch ass up and realize that breaking the law isn't separates the good from the bad, you'll understand that Kevin Mitnick can be a positive force henceforth as he has been for at least the past several years. Both for the solidity of this community and for the idea that something can go right in the world, he deserves it.
As for straight jobs, get real. You spend your life doing something, it becomes your passion. If his "straight job" is too successful for you to consider fair, then get your head examined, because you've got an ass for a head, and I think that would amuse a doctor to see.
Flamebait aside, I hate the world for the way it is; I wish it were different. Support the ACLU, the EFF, and those of us who have made mistakes.
None of this was coherent, but I've tried to capture why it is that Mitnick is a symbol, both a personal one and perhaps one of the hacker community.
Someone more eloquent than me, please, try to explain to anomoly.
OF course it's not insightful! I'm just basically trying to generate some responses here. There IS a problem with the movies: a) they're crap b) they're not really playable c) it makes no sense for bioware to offer 125MB of downloads per linux user. d) there is no linux binary to convert a Bink to a mpeg or similar. e) replacing the movies with a few stills sounds ghetto but frankly that seems like the only real solution i've heard so far. f) releasing the client without movies would be UBER cool, but I have a feeling it's not going to happen, becuase Bioware probably doesn't like the idea of incomplete clients running around.
actually, I am aware what Bink is, with regards to availability. What we're NOT talking about here is the particulars of the codec. The problems that surround the use of the codec seem to be that A) it doesn't really offer that great performance, based on a few of the other replies my post has gotten, and B) it isn't avaiable on other platforms. So stop bitching and contribute your thoughts, otherwise, you're wasting everybody's time, yo.
correction there IS a good reason to use DirectX. DirectX works on windows platforms. And while all these others do, hopefully, work, that hopefully is not something that is going to appeal to Bioware. While I agree, SDL seems like a very good DirectX replacement, when I say "SDL" to a non linux guy, there's a very low chance of recognition. Because while SDL does exist on a bunch of different platforms and seems to work pretty well at least on linux and win32, it's just not the giant that DirectX is. Give it time though. All this crap with microsoft changing its DirectX API every 6 months will eventually tire people out.
ah, but can you download a RAD Video Tools for linux? there is the question. If you could, no contest, the installation could convert the movies and you'd be ready to roll.
1) exactly. 2) yes, RAD may offer these tools, but you want people in linux to be able to run them. If its a win32 utility, packaging it with the linux client download does jack. 3) I didn't say mutually exclusive options.:) 4) Depends on the licensing. Though, since mplayer is GPL and not LGPL, they can't build a custom version, or package mplayer with the product, I suppose. However, they COULD set the linux client download page up such that it was like: download#1: installer, download#2 support libraries (sources included), thus breaking the 'package' abstraction. And running exec("/usr/local/bin/mplayer",mpargs); or whatever doesn't really consititute incorporation, btw. 5) The media, preconverted. Not a good option, not good to have poeple downloading 200 megabytes of media every time they install the game. 6) no, not really. You misunderstood me/I wasn't clear enough.
if you're having response issues, try another wm. like blackbox. KDE is slow on this box too, but blackbox never gives me problems. When E17 comes out, compare that to KDE.
As for "only appears good because of the endless layers of gtk and whatnot to make it look nice" - if you were to look at windows, and break it down to the primitive display functions (those parallel with Xlib), you would find out that NOTHING looks good. A stipled box is a stipled box, no matter what platform you're on. Just because Windows has a standard gtk equivalent, doesn't mean its any better.:)
There ARE light windowing systems out there, like Berlin. However, virtually nobody uses them yet.
As for Dx, we have SDL. Its' not directx, but it does do OpenGL on linux, in addition to merging lots of different APIs together for a nice complete package.
As for X itself, it happens to provide a lot of functions that are very fast for doing just about anything. Thus, X is good. Overdevelopped; perhaps. Nobody is meant to use Xlib these days anyhow.
Anyhow, pretty much I think I just wound up refuting all your points, it wasn't intended to be flamebait.:)
strike that, 6. And basically, what I'm saying, is that if they want movies in the linux build, they have a big problem doing this.
As for waiting an extra 3 months, I'd much rather have the game now without movies and using SDL for sound. Performance issues, mixing not-cool enough... I don't really care. For now. It'd be nice to have a polished version of the game in 3 months, but I was looking forward to playing this game over Christmas break for 3 months now,so this really bummed me out.
Moral of the story: if planning to release someting on multiple platforms, make more informed decisions about things like media formats. BINK clearly was not the best choice, unless the BINK people went ahead and claimed they were doing a linux port soon. (Doubtful.)
Slashdot Mirror
there is quite a difference between insanity and being a (psycho|socio)path.
The point of justice is not actually what you think it is, either. It's rehabilitation.
Someone who is insane probably does not have an accurate view of reality - like in the example I listed earlier. Someone who goes around murdering people out of malice, knowing full well what he is doing is not necessarily insane, and certainly not by virtue of his actions by our legal definitons.
And that point about releasing people who are found not guilty by reason of insanity; I agree with you on this. The problem is that people who have recovered/leanred to live with their disorder under appropriate supervision/medication should be released. The fact of the matter is that people who have recovered - and I'll trust their evaluators on that fact - are not released as commonly as you probably would like to think. For this reason, I think that the issue deserves attention, respect, and sensativity.
Once again, sorry for bleating like a dying, clubbed baby seal, but I felt that I should add that although I don't have any links that I can think of right now DIRECTLY on the subject, I would like to direct you to a series of essays on kuro5hin.org, written by a man living with schizoaffective disorder. Although it probably won't change your viewpoints, perhaps upon reading about some of this guy's experiences, you'll have a building block to construct a more enlightened philosophy of justice and of mental disorder.
Forgive the sound of the dying giraffe, but I have to say that the insanity defense is no joke. NGRI is something under constant attack by people who don't really understand it.
Consider this: you are driving your car. you hit a baby, baby dies. You weren't driving particularly recklessly, under the speedlimit, visibility was just low. It's sad and it happens.
Consider this: you are drunk, driving your car. And by drunk, I mean you are impaired. You aren't driving particularly recklessly, but the same thing as above happens.
Now, this doesn't apply to NGRI directly, but consider this: the circumstances around a crime impact the meaning of it. Both of those situations flat out suck, but the argument is that you were being especially irresponsible in the second case, but not in the first.
Let's say you are sane and you kill a guy named Sam. (Sorry, Sam.) He kicked your dog, and now you're going to pump his head full of lead and do some of that stuff out of the first scene of "Way of the Gun".
Now, consider case two: you are insane, and you believe that Jodie Foster is in love with you and tells you to do things, and you feel complied to do so. You are not even aware of your delusion, and the fact that you are having the delusion implies that a great deal of your judgement is impaired. In fact, you could say that you didn't know what you were doing - you can still remember doing them, but you thought you were killing the martian high leader of the invasion force or something. In this case, are you responsible for killing a man, or are you responsible for falling for a delusion, which to you seemed very, very real.
I argue that in this case, you are not guilty of the crime you are charged with because you frankly were not in control of your reality.
And ultimately, if you look up statistics on the defense, you'll find that it is hardly ever used, does not work when it should, and that the mean time spent incarcerated in mental hostpitals by NGRI people is higher than the mean time spent in prison for the same crime.
There is actually a famous case where a guy shot somebody very important under the compulsion of one of his delusionary characters and was found not guilty by reason of insanity, who is now sitting, treated, recovered, in a mental hospital, getting clean review after clean review and not being released by the board that controlls his release.
Whine as much as you want about the implications of this trojan defense, but don't equate it or compare it to the not guilty be reason of insanity defense. They are quite different.
Also, note that it *IS* possible that a trojan's job would be to search for child pornography on Kazaa or something. Ultimately it'll probably just pull up legit porn, but somebody COULD design such a program.
Now, granted that, the prosecution should have made a serious attempt to disprove the defendants claims. I suspect they did otherwise.
I have to agree with you on the subject of remorse. The fact of the matter is that Kevin Mitnick was held without trial so long that he was forced to plea bargain - quite possibly because the prosecution didn't believe it could build a strong enough case on Kevin.
The one who SHOULD be showing remorse here is his prosecutor, for abuse of law and violating the spirit of the justice system. Inadequate law enforcement training is good reason to get better training and become better at collecting evidence; it is NOT justification to extort individuals from having the trial that they are entitled to.
I think Kevin has been remarkably tactful in being so forgiving of what was done to him; maybe all the support behind him helped him with that, but I really think he's a strong individual. I don't think I ever could have recovered from the rape tactics of the prosecution. I would be an angry shell of a man, who lived to do nothing but show others how such a thing could happen. That Kevin bravely meets this kind of criticism all the time with strength and composure tells us a lot about his character. Regardless of his criminal background, I think we should look up to the kind of backbone he has displayed.
Hey, can I be a god too?
yeah... slack is a bit too hardcore for the masses. Going with an entry level distro is probably the way to go. Then, if you find that Redhat and Mandrake are your mortal enemies, give slack a try. That's the story of my life. :) Never been happier... though I hear Gentoo is tight...
I switched to postfix last time! MWAHAHAHAHA!
It's an interesting analysis - I can't really fault you there.
There is certainly that "feel" when you walk out of that movie, that the adventure was about recovering something lost, but I have to agree with previous posters that you might be reading a little too deeply. Then again; you may be completely right. I guess you'd have to ask the director/producer/script-writer, whatever.
say, how does one choose to use the system cursor to avoid the changing cursor bug that crashes moo?
okay, started it windowed this time. i think it has a problem switching from the "scrolling" curser (as you move the mouse to the edge of the screen to move the camera to other parts of the starmap) back to the original. Here's the error message, anyone else getting this one or something similar?
dariusMaster of Orion 3$ winex moo3.exe
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 93 (X_CreateCursor)
Serial number of failed request: 988
Current serial number in output stream: 995
got it working, mouse was invisible, moved over textbox, became visible.
i crashed during turn 2 while moving the mouse around - all screens seem to work so far, so maybe it's a sound issue?
woohooo
Okay, I uninstalled it, reinstalled it, included DX 8.1b and now it gets to the opening screen, though there's no mouse cursor.
Anyone else got similar problems?
(15 minutes later)
Wahoo! Okay, the game looks sweet. The mouse cursor was invisible in the beggining for me, but after putting my mouse over a text box, it became a text cursor, which is a lot better than nothing. The game seemed to have no real problems after that until at the end of turn 2 (15 minutes later) I crashed. I'm using ALSA, gonna try switching drivers.
Say, did you have to do anything special to start it up? Mine dies before displaying any graphics.
My problem initially was that I had a second drive configured in my .transgaming/config to a directory that didn't exist - when moo3 probed for it it died.
try running
winex -debugmsg +err moo3.exe
to see what's going wrong.
Of course, I've still got other problems:
dariusMaster of Orion 3$ winex -debugmsg +err moo3.exe
err:win32:_EnterSysLevel (0x4084d998, level 2): Holding 0x408ed9c4, level 3. Expect deadlock!
fixme:ole:CoSetState (0x653b3758),stub!
fixme:file:SetFileAttributesA (C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SIntf16.dll):100 attribute(s) not implemented.
fixme:file:SetFileAttributesA (C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SIntf32.dll):100 attribute(s) not implemented.
fixme:file:SetFileAttributesA (C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SIntfNT.dll):100 attribute(s) not implemented.
fixme:aspi:TranslateASPI32Address (0xafef60, 0xb05104), stub !
fixme:aspi:SendASPI32Command ASPI: Partially implemented SC_HA_INQUIRY for adapter 0.
fixme:ole:CoSetState ((nil)),stub!
ideas anyone?
Seriously - look at the MPAA - self regulating that stuff.
There don't need any laws to make it happen.
The day that ebworld.com has to only sell to adults or people who can verify the age is the day I start helping 6 year olds get AdultPass'es or whatever sort of AVS the government will require.
grr.
Who said he had a social agenda?
The social agenda is mine.
Nobody accused him of being a hero, but he is a symbol.
And social engineering still works, I'm afriad.
Why must he be a hero?
He doesn't have to be, but the fact of the matter is this:
For every time you've sat in front of the computer at 4:30AM on IRC, programming, listening to music over Icecast, hacking kernel stuff, or just daydreaming about things you wish you could change in the world, hacking the world in your head, desparately wishing something out there could be different, for every time you see past the crap of the world and see what kind of attrocities are committed for the sake of power, or for the support of somebody's agenda...
or even for every time you reminisce about the way things used to be, or how much you miss your ex-girlfriends, or how you hate that your favorite author died so young...
If for nothing else, for that you should understand why Kevin Mitnick is someone who deserves our support.
The fact of the matter is this man has lost more time than you can imagine. He has lost it for his crimes, but his crimes are not crimes of malice.
For the way he was treated and for the time he has lost, and for the way that our society treats those who have run afoul with the law, this guy deserves your support. If you can't feel compassion, feel guilt: this is your world too, and through inaction, you have helped create it.
When you grow your bitch ass up and realize that breaking the law isn't separates the good from the bad,
you'll understand that Kevin Mitnick can be a positive force henceforth as he has been for at least the past several years. Both for the solidity of this community and for the idea that something can go right in the world, he deserves it.
As for straight jobs, get real. You spend your life doing something, it becomes your passion. If his "straight job" is too successful for you to consider fair, then get your head examined, because you've got an ass for a head, and I think that would amuse a doctor to see.
Flamebait aside, I hate the world for the way it is; I wish it were different. Support the ACLU, the EFF, and those of us who have made mistakes.
None of this was coherent, but I've tried to capture why it is that Mitnick is a symbol, both a personal one and perhaps one of the hacker community.
Someone more eloquent than me, please, try to explain to anomoly.
I'm going to sleep.
OF course it's not insightful! I'm just basically trying to generate some responses here. There IS a problem with the movies: a) they're crap b) they're not really playable c) it makes no sense for bioware to offer 125MB of downloads per linux user. d) there is no linux binary to convert a Bink to a mpeg or similar. e) replacing the movies with a few stills sounds ghetto but frankly that seems like the only real solution i've heard so far. f) releasing the client without movies would be UBER cool, but I have a feeling it's not going to happen, becuase Bioware probably doesn't like the idea of incomplete clients running around.
actually, I am aware what Bink is, with regards to availability. What we're NOT talking about here is the particulars of the codec. The problems that surround the use of the codec seem to be that A) it doesn't really offer that great performance, based on a few of the other replies my post has gotten, and B) it isn't avaiable on other platforms. So stop bitching and contribute your thoughts, otherwise, you're wasting everybody's time, yo.
correction
there IS a good reason to use DirectX. DirectX works on windows platforms. And while all these others do, hopefully, work, that hopefully is not something that is going to appeal to Bioware. While I agree, SDL seems like a very good DirectX replacement, when I say "SDL" to a non linux guy, there's a very low chance of recognition. Because while SDL does exist on a bunch of different platforms and seems to work pretty well at least on linux and win32, it's just not the giant that DirectX is. Give it time though. All this crap with microsoft changing its DirectX API every 6 months will eventually tire people out.
that explains the variety of different sound formats I see in miles games. Wowzers.
ah, but can you download a RAD Video Tools for linux? there is the question.
If you could, no contest, the installation could convert the movies and you'd be ready to roll.
1) exactly. :)
2) yes, RAD may offer these tools, but you want people in linux to be able to run them. If its a win32 utility, packaging it with the linux client download does jack.
3) I didn't say mutually exclusive options.
4) Depends on the licensing. Though, since mplayer is GPL and not LGPL, they can't build a custom version, or package mplayer with the product, I suppose. However, they COULD set the linux client download page up such that it was like: download#1: installer, download#2 support libraries (sources included), thus breaking the
'package' abstraction. And running exec("/usr/local/bin/mplayer",mpargs); or whatever doesn't really consititute incorporation, btw.
5) The media, preconverted. Not a good option, not good to have poeple downloading 200 megabytes of media every time they install the game.
6) no, not really. You misunderstood me/I wasn't clear enough.
if you're having response issues, try another wm. like blackbox. KDE is slow on this box too, but blackbox never gives me problems. When E17 comes out, compare that to KDE.
:)
:)
As for "only appears good because of the endless layers of gtk and whatnot to make it look nice" - if you were to look at windows, and break it down to the primitive display functions (those parallel with Xlib), you would find out that NOTHING looks good. A stipled box is a stipled box, no matter what platform you're on. Just because Windows has a standard gtk equivalent, doesn't mean its any better.
There ARE light windowing systems out there, like Berlin. However, virtually nobody uses them yet.
As for Dx, we have SDL. Its' not directx, but it does do OpenGL on linux, in addition to merging lots of different APIs together for a nice complete package.
As for X itself, it happens to provide a lot of functions that are very fast for doing just about anything. Thus, X is good. Overdevelopped; perhaps. Nobody is meant to use Xlib these days anyhow.
Anyhow, pretty much I think I just wound up refuting all your points, it wasn't intended to be flamebait.
strike that, 6.
And basically, what I'm saying, is that if they want movies in the linux build, they have a big problem doing this.
As for waiting an extra 3 months, I'd much rather have the game now without movies and using SDL for sound. Performance issues, mixing not-cool enough... I don't really care. For now. It'd be nice to have a polished version of the game in 3 months, but I was looking forward to playing this game over Christmas break for 3 months now,so this really bummed me out.
Moral of the story: if planning to release someting on multiple platforms, make more informed decisions about things like media formats. BINK clearly was not the best choice, unless the BINK people went ahead and claimed they were doing a linux port soon. (Doubtful.)