Seeing as you don't know if I'm even American, I think your reply is a bit ill-thought-out.
As for people "allowing" Bush's election, I'm curious as to what you suggest they should have done. Are you faulting everyone who did not martyr themselves in some kind of armed insurrection? Do you think the aftermath of such an act would lead to more freedom rather than less? At what point should they have done it? When he was first elected? He only looked like a second-rate president, not a nascent tyrant; the erosion of freedom has come one grain of sand at a time. His second term? By then he was too entrenched for anything short of (and possibly including) the aforementioned armed insurrection to pry him out.
In addition, your statement is self-contradictory. You say that Americans got what they said they wanted -- but you also acknowledge that Bush was not elected by the majority of the popular vote. Which is it? More voters didn't want Bush in office than did want him, so at best the majority is getting what the minority deserves.
What concerns me is that the Bush administration is not acting like it is approaching the end of a term and contemplating the possible, even probable, transfer of power to the opposition party. Instead, it is taking steps that only seem logical if it, not any successor, intends to remain in office. Anyone want to start a betting pool on when the Reichstag fire will be?
The nuke will not be ticking. The person who delivered it there will also be the person who pushes the button to set it off. What, you think an organization that specializes in suicide bombers wouldn't be able to find someone to do that?
The whole "ticking bomb" scenario is a straw man. Any organization with basically competent operational security (which is something that Al-Qaida has demonstrated) will compartmentalize essential information so that no one person can compromise the whole plan. Well, except for the man carrying the nuke, but if you catch him he just pushes the button.
And assuming for the moment you do have a "ticking bomb" scenario, and you've got the guy who can lead you to the bomb, all he has to do is run out the clock. It's amazing how much a person can endure if they know they only have to do it for some definite time, even if they don't expect to get a free ticket to Paradise out of it.
There is a story I read years ago, possibly in a science fiction magazine, that I'd like to track down, and can't. I believe the title was "Citizen Torturer" but I've been unable to find any reference at all to anything by that name. The basic premise was that ordinary citizens were recruited and trained as official government torturers for just such "ticking bomb" scenarios, and their purpose was gradually expanded until they were doing such things as torturing a group of office workers, knowing all but one of them were innocent, to find the one who was embezzling. That is chillingly like what we've seen with everything from the RICO Act to these National Security Letters. First the extraordinary power is for a specific, worthy goal, such as going after the Mafia, then it is broadened to apply to other sorts of "bad guys", and in the end it is turned against ordinary citizens. I want to read that story again, so if anyone can give me any information -- the name, the author, anything -- I would very much appreciate it.
I don't live in Spain, but I know this sort of thing is coming to the US sooner or later.
Why it's unfair:
I have hundreds of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, and a few flash chips, sitting around me here. Not a single one of them contains any illicit material whatsoever. They're backups of my data, copies of my digital photographs, etc. My printers are used to print content I generate. My scanner is used to scan my clients' materials or stuff that needs to be faxed. I bought a couple of blank VHS tapes the other day -- to tape (with the help of a little IR camera) the nocturnal antics of a couple of my pet mice.
It is unjust that someone who has done nothing wrong, who has not even considered doing anything wrong, should be punished under the ASSUMPTION that they are going to do something wrong. It's not even "guilty until proven innocent", it's "guilty with no way to prove innocence".
Don't say that that I, or people like me, "deserve" that punishment because other people have done something wrong. Collective punishment is totally unjust. Nobody deserves to be punished for something that they neither did nor had any control over.
Why should someone like me be forced to give money to musicians whose music I hate, creators of TV shows that I wouldn't watch if the alternative was a test pattern, and so on, just because I need blank media to store and distribute my photographs, back up my data, or videotape my marathon-running rodents? Why should someone filming their kid's dance recital or soccer tournament have to pay money to someone whose music is banned in their house? Why should my elderly mother-in-law have to pay N.W.A. or Britney Spears to take pictures of her own grandkids?
This is nothing but a money grab. And no, it's not a money grab for the people who actually created the work in question; it's a money grab for the industry organization that "supports" them... but, in the US, was "unable to find" active, popular performers to give them their licensing fees a couple of years ago, until the NY state attorney general gave them a not-so-gentle reminder.
Never mind taxation without representation -- fight punishment without so much as evidence, let alone conviction, and no right of appeal.
Will GoDaddy reimburse the fee that you shouldn't have had to pay, should it be shown that your domain was not being used nefariously? I somehow doubt it.
I wouldn't doubt it in the least.
As it happens, I'm a GoDaddy customer. I've also dealt with Network Solutions and MelbourneIT. GoDaddy stands head and shoulders above both of those big-name, big-rep registrars in terms of service, value for the money, and especially ethics. It wasn't GoDaddy who refused to give Panix their domain name back when it got jacked due to Melbourne's own sloppiness. GoDaddy doesn't send out fake "rewnewal" notices for domains owned by other registrars. And it certainly wasn't GoDaddy who tried to convince us SiteFinder was for our benefit. I'm not saying GoDaddy is a bunch of saints -- they're not, they're a bunch of businessmen -- but they're head and shoulders above the competition, ethics-wise.
They're also the only registrar I know of, and one of the damn few businesses of any type, where you can go yell at the big cheese personally. Bob Parsons and I have exchanged words a time or two via his blog. I suspect if I called up GoDaddy and wanted to talk to him, they'd put me through.
Oh, as to how they can sell domain names below cost: The actual offer is a domain for $1.99 when you buy a non-domain product, such as a hosting contract. They make money on that in exactly the way the Friendly's down the street from me is making money off a free ice cream sundae when you buy a chicken platter. Nothing shady about that, just a "buy a big thing, get a little thing cheap/free" deal like millions of other businesses offer every day. They make their money off of regular priced domain names (not much each, but their volume is incredible) and all of their other products and services, from software to hosting.
No, I don't work for GoDaddy, I'm just one of their customers. All the money flows from me to them, not the other way around. But I just got sick of all the speculation, insinuations, baseless assumptions, and general-purpose bashing from uninformed people who know nothing more about GoDaddy and its business practices than what they read in Slashdot comments.
I don't read Slashdot much anymore, and this kind of thing is one of the reasons why. Come on, guys, we're better than this. Or at least we used to be.
And those that buy gold would instead have to spend part of the time they play now by farming themselves so they can get the gold they want to spend on stuff, perhaps an epic mount. So what?
So, all players would have to do the same things in game to achieve the same rewards, instead of some people bypassing the game and just buying those rewards. Would you say the same thing about a dupe bug? It has the same effect.
>In addition, in many cases multiple players are playing the
>same account to keep the farming going 24/7.
In no case can more than one player play the same account at once. There is virtually NO difference it people take shift playing the same character or each playing their own character, they farm just as much or little in a given time.
I didn't say they were playing more than once. What I said was that the farming characters are in play 24/7. So while they appear to be a small percentage of the population, they have a much greater impact than their numbers would indicate. With the numbers I used, one farmer would have the economic strength of about 30 ordinary players.
>This is a multiplying factor.
How? Do ammount of gold or item multiply in the game if the same account is played for a long time? See comment above, no difference.
Joe Average plays 4 hours a day, of which an hour is spent spamming the LFG channel, other maintenance activities, talking with friends, etc. Fred Farmer plays 24 hours a day (multiple farming company employees working 8-hour shifts) and except for occasional breaks to mail farmed items off to the storage/sales mule, all 24 hours of that is spent farming gold or items. Why is it difficult for you to comprehend that farming for 24 hours produces more gold and items than farming for 4 hours?
If you compare to people idling in town and such, yeah probably, ordinary people playing generate gold and items too you know. Someone farming doesn't have a turbo button that make monsters have less hit points or drop more items.
No, but they have 24 hours a day to do the farming while the average player has (pulling a number out of thin air here) 4 hours. Also, the professional farmers are doing nothing but farming, while the ordinary player is doing quests, helping out a couple of guildies, checking out the AH, looking for a group, doing an instance run where he gets nothing but some BOP paladin plate (and he's a shaman), etc. The average player's gold/item generation efficiency is terrible.
If you take those farmers away, someone else will farm instead, the players that now buy their items in AH would, if there were no items on sale there, go farm themselves instead, no difference except that more people probably can do other stuff than farming in the game. You think it would be better if each player themseves had to go farm half their playing time?
Yes, because then in-game wealth would be proportional to the effort expended, skill acquired, and time committed by the player, rather than to their real-world wealth and their willingness to cheat. Also, that's the game the way Blizzard designed the game, and the way the majority of players want to be able to play it. Even most of the ones buying gold from the farming companies, at least the ones I know, would prefer that nobody could buy gold rather than that everybody could. (of course, their ideal situation is nobody but themselves buying gold) If Blizzard had wanted World of Warcraft to be a Warcraft-themed version of Second Life, that's the game they would have made, and we would have made our buying decisions based on that. But they didn't, and we didn't, and we want the game we were promised where what we can do, not what we can spend, is what counts.
Here's the important part, though: The game management makes decisions which necessarily take farming into
The farmers generate the majority of high-end items sold in the game, and collude to keep the prices high. If someone undercuts them, they buy the item and repost it higher. These are not random individuals, remember; these are rooms full of people working for large corporations.
Does anyone have any figures on how well SOE's Station Exchange in EQ2 is actually working? As I understand it (totally anecodatally here) they expected to be able to expand the system to more/most servers, and instead the SE-enabled servers are struggling and losing rather than gaining players. Any evidence (or even further anecdotes) about what's really happening would be appreciated.
People, as a rule, want to play a game where their particular abilities give them an edge over other players. People with fast reflexes, for instance, gravitate towards "twitch" games such as FPS games. People who are good at tracking multiple things at once enjoy detail-oriented games such as RTS games. And people whose edge is a lack of ethics, a willingness to cheat, prefer games in which other people do not cheat. Imagine a competitive FPS server which advertised that all hacks, aimbots, tracking bots, etc., were permitted. A few people might come try it out, just out of curiousity, but nobody would stay to play. The bot-users, etc., want an environment where nobody else is using them, where they have an edge. That's why Station Exchange is doomed to fail in the long run. Most people don't want the Sword of Uberness just because they think it looks neat; they want it because it will give them an edge over other players. Even in PvE, it's easier to get groups, and you perform better in groups, with better gear. But if the Sword of Uberness is available to anyone with cash (or, more important, more cash than you have) what's the point? You don't have that edge after all, because I.G.E. has teams in-game farming 24/7 so anyone can have a Sword of Uberness, they just have to buy it from I.G.E.
Just like a wolf wants to be surrounded by sheep, not other wolves, and a griefer wants to be surrounded by victims, not other griefers, cheaters (including gold buyers) want to be surrounded by non-cheaters. It's not an advantage if everybody is doing it. Since Station Exchange is basically cheating-enabled servers, the cheaters are going to play anywhere and everywhere else.
It affects everyone's play experience for a number of reasons:
For one thing, the gold farmers concentrate exclusively on producing gold. They are not playing, they are working, and as such devote all of their time to gathering more gold. Therefore, they naturally make more gold per hour than ordinary players, often many times more. In addition, in many cases multiple players are playing the same account to keep the farming going 24/7. This is a multiplying factor. If we say that a commercial farmer is 5x more efficient than the average player at generating gold (and that's probably an understatement) and plays around the clock versus, say, 4 hours a night for the average player, we're looking at a single farming account generating as much gold as 30 ordinary players. So it's not just a matter of the money being already in the economy but changing hands; there's a lot more being produced.
For another, the same ratio applies to the production of items, especially the rare and epic items that are bind-on-equip world drops. So if 5% of the population of your server is commercial farmers (and from my experience tracking farmers in WoW, that's the right order of magnitude) those 5% are producing more items, half again more, than the entire population of legitimate players combined. This gives them massive power to control the market, further increased by the fact that they sell virtually all the sellable items they get, rather than using them as upgrades to their own gear when possible as ordinary players would. Normally the increased supply of items would drive down prices, but the items are in the hands of the gold farmers, who collude to keep prices high.
With the help of this economic advantage, they have partial control of the market. They sell high, and if someone is selling items cheaper, they buy up those items and resell them, too. The resulting high prices drive more players to buying gold from the RMT companies. So they sell the gold for real-world cash, and then get it back again from selling overpriced items, and except for that part bled off by AH fees, etc., they keep circulating it around, getting their payment in RL cash every time it passes through their hands. It's a can't-lose situation for them. Furthermore, in a PvP game, the ever-increasing inflation brought on by the RMT gold sales means that players either have to devote insane amounts of time to earning gold, or just give up and buy it from the RMT companies. So the cycle continues.
Then we get to the farmers themselves. I have known quite a few of them, and with very few exceptions, they are not nice people. Making friends is no part of the job. Their goal is to get as much gold as possible as quickly as possible, by any means possible. When they are not soloing Maraudon, they parasitize pickup groups in high-level instances. They make up the vast majority of the ninja looters I have known. They don't care about their long-term reputation, because they don't need to get into an endgame guild, and pickup groups are often desperate enough to take anyone who's available. Besides, the account will probably get banned soon enough anyway (RIP Claing), before a spreading reputation as a ninja cuts down on their grouping options. Even when they're not ninja looting, grabbing chests, etc., they are less fun than average in a group because few of them speak English, so they can't participate in group chat or understand instructions, and many of them are not competent group players because they're accustomed to soloing or grouping with people in the same physical room with them.
They have taken over substantial areas of the game. Since the implementation of PvP rewards this hasn't been so bad, but at one point Azshara was, on my server at least, exclusively owned by the gold farmers. They camped the Legashi satyr camps 24/7, and had gank squads of rogues on standby to ensure that ownership. If you were Horde they called in the Alliance gankers, and vise versa -- most likely merely a matter of shouting t
Your suggestion would work, but not for the reason you think.
It would work because there would be no use for gold other than paying for repairs and buying the occasional item from an NPC. If you couldn't transfer gold without permanently killing the character giving up the gold, then you couldn't use your hard-earned gold to buy one of those nice pearl-handled daggers that my rogue just put up on the Orgrimmar AH. You'd have the dagger... but you'd be permadead. Kind of useless, no?
Allowing gold transfer only through AH sales wouldn't help, either; the gold buyers would just put up trash items for the intended transfer amount, and the seller would buy them. Trying to defeat that by artificially capping the price of items would require repeated transactions, but the same result, and make a mess of the economy as well. Preventing any non-AH transfers of items between players (to prevent returning the item to be re-'sold') would reduce that, but by that point, you've broken your game so badly that your problem is no longer gold sellers, it's players, or the lack thereof.
In the case of buying gold, if someone doesn't enjoy one particular aspect of a game (the grinding for money part) but they do like what the grinding can get them (access to good stuff) then why is it stupid to have someone else do the scut work so they can then enjoy the benefits?
I don't enjoy the practice, practice, practice required to get good at playing Counterstrike, but I do enjoy fragging people. So why shouldn't I just be able to use an aimbot so I can enjoy the benefits?
As for how many people buy gold, look at all the epic mounts you see running around. Do you really think people are farming 1000 gold? Or even 570?
I have, as of this afternoon, roughly 4400 gold on my main server, plus easily that much in stuff in the bank awaiting the proper time to sell it. (for example, when the Darkmoon Faire is in town) I'm not in a big guild and I can't be on much at primetime, so I've never even seen the endgame raid instances; so what epic gear I have, I've bought.
I have another character that I played for awhile as a "tourist" on a carebear server. That character is level 27, and has roughly 200 gold.
When my regular server was down for extra hours after maintenance, I made a newbie on another server just to try out a paladin. As of this morning, that character was level 14 and had 22 gold.
I have never bought so much as a bent copper piece for real-world cash. A RL friend who was quitting the game gave me some of his stuff, mostly herbs, worth maybe 200g maximum, but other than that, I've earned every copper of it.
So yes, people are farming 570, or 1000, or 4400 gold. I've had over 5000 at times, usually just before a gear-buying spree. And every last copper piece of that has come from a drop from a mob, from the sale of an item, or from a fee for services (enchanting, lockpicking, etc.) I have never, nor will I ever, buy gold for real-world cash. I will not support the greedy parasites who are destroying the games that I love.
Besides, it's a game -- a competition -- and gold is how I keep score. My "score" in WoW would be meaningless if I just went to eBay and bought points.
Re:Does any one have a link to what JT said?
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More On The MGS Suicide
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I see that you mention in your second post that you don't know who Jack Thompson is. Sadly, he is in fact one of the "radicalist nutjobs" you refer to.
Yeah, right - stop pretending you're immune, that you'd notice at all, or behave any differently if you did.
Actually, I have personally been in that situation. And I behaved very much like the people on the MGS forums did: I talked to the person, tried to talk him out of it, and used the information I had to contact the real-world forces (cops, in this case) who could and would help. I was luckier than Kuja's friends; the person in question is still alive. But I've been tested in that fire, and I know what I would do, because I have done it.
That's what really happened -- not what Jack Thompson, in his twisted way, is telling people happened. The people who knew that troubled young man did more than "get up from their computer"; they did everything in their power, individually and collectively, to help him. They did what they could, but it wasn't enough, and their community is bleeding. All of us who have been touched by this, or a tragedy or near-tragedy like it, hurt along with them.
Then Jack Thompson jumps into this pain, the pain both of Mitch's online friends who tried to save him and failed, and his offline family who shared his life, who found his body, who are devastated. He, a man who has devoted his life to destroying video games (or at least to being paid a lot of money for pushing lawsuits against game companies) has his own "answers". According to him, Mitch died because he didn't follow Mr. Thompson's religion. He died because one of his hobbies happened to be playing computer games. One wonders, if it turns out that he also played basketball, would Jack Thompson wage war against that, too?
And then Mr. Thompson turns his bile on the people who are already in agony over their inability to help a friend when he needed it the most. The surivivors of a suicide are vulnerable themselves; they torment themselves thinking they could have done something more, seen something they missed, something, anything. So Mr. "Compassionate Christian"/spit Thompson rubs salt into their wounds. He denies that they did anything at all. He accuses them of not caring, of not trying. And he knows what he's doing.
I'm sure at some point in your life, NoMaster, you have had the experience of someone -- a parent, a teacher, a boss -- accusing you of not trying when you know you poured all you had into something. Mine was a boss who dismissed a project I sweated blood over for weeks as trivial, not even worth his time to review. There is a special sort of pain that goes with that, pain that abusive parents and spouses know well how to inflict. When it concerns not just a term paper or a work project but the life of a friend, the pain is indescribable. A decent, compassionate, moral person would acknowledge what those hurting people, those family and friends, are going through, would acknowledge that they tried their best, would console them -- not accuse them of not caring, of never trying at all, of causing the very thing that has torn their hearts open. That is not "a wonderful thing". That is viciousness on a master level. It is on a par with the fatherless sons of diseased dogs who line up outside the funerals of people who have died of AIDS and scream at the bereaved families that their son, their brother, their beloved, is burning in hell. It's not about getting anyone to think -- it's about hurting for the sheer sadistic joy of hurting another human being.
You, as you say, are not a gamer. You are not a part of these little communities of ours. I'm not sure that anyone who has never participated in one can really understand what it is like. Just as there were people a century ago who maintained a friendship by postal correspondence for years or decades, so we have our friends we have never met in the physical world. We might not know their real names, but we know their hopes, t
20 World of Warcraft players will die this month!!
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Somewhere in the US, at a rate of almost one per day, a World of Warcraft player tragically takes his own life.
No, no, don't lynch me yet. I'm a WoW player myself, and on the side of the good guys. I'm just spinning some statistics here to give you an idea of the numbers involved, and hopefully to have some ammunition against the likes of Jack/spit Thompson.
Here's the (very rough) numbers:
The US suicide rate is roughly 12 per 100,000 people. It varies by age group, but for the sake of discussion let's assume that it's approximately correct for the demographic of WoW players. While I'm assuming things, let's also say that there are 2 million WoW players in the US. (it's been a while since I've seen figures, but with 5 million worldwide, that should be in the right ballpark)
2 million players,.012% of them commit suicide annually, that's 240 a year, or 20 a month. Tens of people a month... hundreds per year... that's a lot of people. A lot of tragedies. Enough to touch every faction on every server.
But here's the catch: You could probably generate roughly similar figures on WoW players being elected to public office, winning the lottery, or being murdered. When you're talking about millions of people, ANYTHING happens in non-trivial numbers. Pull those numbers out of context, though, and you can make them look like whatever you want them to. You just have to spin the numbers fast enough and hope your readers don't think for themselves.
Of course, made-up "facts" are a lot more lurid than the real truth. They're a lot more "newsworthy" than the things that really happen, the things that we as people who happen to play online games have seen and done. I am far from the only gamer who has sat up all night talking, listening, to a depressed kid who I only knew as text on a screen, with no possible means of contact except that fragile thread of words. There are a couple of people alive today who might not be if they hadn't had me, or someone else they knew in-game, to talk to. One is for sure: some of our mutual friends (I wasn't around at the time) tracked down his parents and got him hauled to the hospital in time. Of course, "Gamer Sits Up All Night Listening To Depressed Friend" just doesn't have the "oomph!" for a good headline. "Teenage Gamer Doesn't Commit Suicide" won't sell many papers. Making stuff up, on the other hand, seems to work very well.
Hundreds of thousands of people read Slashdot. Statistics being what they are, the odds are pretty good some of them will be journalists. Some of those will be shady journalists. If you happen to be one of them, think about this the next time you're tempted to make something like this up: Is it really worth selling papers if the price is the pain inflicted on a person's family, friends, and community when they read your lies?
And since the applications do not have any integrated security such as VPN technology, the passwords to these accounts are often stored in clear text (not encrypted), thus becoming visible to developers, support staff and anyone that has access to the application code.
Just what do they think the connection is between using VPN (fundamentally a communications protocol) and whether or not a password is embedded in the source code? *sigh* The impression I've gotten of the whole article, reinforced by things like that sentence, is that it exemplifies the saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
"Depleted uranium (DU) is the highly toxic and radioactive byproduct of the uranium enrichment process... Depleted uranium is roughly 60% as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium, and has a half life of 4.5 billion years.
Uranium is toxic, sure. It's a heavy metal, and heavy metals are toxic. Consider lead as another example.
"Highly toxic and radioactive" implies both highly toxic and highly radioactive. That is absolutely not the case. While uranium, like any heavy metal, is toxic if ingested, it's not only not highly radioactive, it's bordering on inert. Because almost all the U-235, the active isotope, is gone, it's far less radioactive than uranium in its unrefined form.
Half-life and radioactivity are inversely related. The more radioactive an element is, the shorter its half-life is. For those who don't remember the definition, half-life is the time it takes for half of the atoms in a substance to undergo radioactive decay. Therefore, something that is emitting radiation at a high rate -- that is, undergoing a lot of atomic decay -- is necessarily going to have a short half-life; something with a long half-life is mostly sitting there, and once in a while a nucleus decays. In the case of U-238 (which constitutes 99.8%+ of depleted uranium) in four and a half billion years, roughly half the atoms in your sample will have ejected an alpha particle and turned into lead. The other half have just been sitting there, doing nothing, being inert, for four and a half billion years. As radioactive materials go, that's pushing pretty close to not radioactive at all. In fact, depleted uranium is used for radiation shielding to block gamma rays!
Now, with regard to those alpha particles: they're flying helium nuclei. They're not very good at penetrating things. Like, oh, skin. Paper. Substantial amounts of air. Try it yourself sometime: get your hands on an alpha source (your local antique shop can probably supply you with a piece of red Fiesta Ware pottery) and a Geiger counter (surplus stores often have them). Put the Geiger counter's tube by the Fiesta Ware, listen to the nice clicking. Now put a sheet of notebook paper between them. The clicking stops.
Thirty members of Rokke's cleanup team have already died, and he has 5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation in his body, resulting in damage to his lungs and kidneys, brain lesions, skin postules, chronic fatigue, continual wheezing and painful fibromyalgia.
He'd have had to be eating the depleted uranium to get anywhere close to that level of exposure. At which point, he'd be dead from heavy metal poisoning already, so any radiation wouldn't be an issue. Remember, something doesn't become radioactive from being exposed to alpha particles. You need slow neutrons for that, and U-238 is not a good slow neutron source. Enough slow neutrons to make a human being radioactive will also make him dead. Enough depleted uranium in the body to produce measurable radioactivity will kill him just like a large amount of lead, mercury, or other heavy metal.
As for "5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation"... well, let's look at some numbers. Assuming we're talking exposure limits here, the recommended annual limit for nuclear workers is 20 mSv. 5,000 times that would be 100 Sv, which is 10x the amount that will cause death within days or weeks. So if this guy really had 5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation exposure, he'd be dead. Even assuming the writer was exaggerating by an order of magnitude, his symptoms wouldn't be fibromyalgia or painful wheezing -- they'd be vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, bleeding from every available orifice, massive bruising at the slightest touch, etc. A picture of the guy shows him with hair, no bruises, and not bleeding from anywhere apparent.
Too much scary writing, too many misstatements, and too many numbers that just don't add up.
But when I select Help->About in Windows, there is no message giving me (the user) the right to redistribute copies of the software, which is what a GPL program does. (As GPL programs with either a splashscreen or an About box are required to print a message of that nature)
You didn't answer my question:
If you come over to my house and use my computer to read Slashdot, am I somehow distributing Windows?
This particular computer happens to be running Windows. Microsoft's license, of course, prohibits me from distributing Windows. If you come over to my house and use my computer to read Slashdot, am I somehow distributing Windows?
Corporations are not alive. They are not human, they are not people.
Actually, corporation are people. It's one of the more bizarre aspects of US law, but corporations are people. You're confusing "people" as a generality with natural people, which are the kind that walk and talk and bleed. If you ever seen something -- say, a contest entry form or a MMORPG user agreement -- which restricts usage to a "natural person" that's to exclude corporations, because otherwise "person" would mean an entire corporation, too.
You just shot your own argument through the head. Your example of...declaring "I am not distributing this program to you, even though I am placing these CD-ROMs into your hands, because I am retaining ownership of them. Not only will you not get the source code, but also I can demand back the binaries at any future time." is as good an example of a lease as I've seen lately.
I quit using Yahoo search when they started charging to be included in it. I want to search all available websites, not just those run by companies who can pay multi-hundred-dollar fees.
According to Snopes, the cards actually do have nothing except a magick code to open the door, an expiration date, and sometimes a yes/no flag to say if you're allowed to charge things to your room or not.
This whole thing seems to go back to a very dubious and undocumented story that was passed around the Pasadena police department a number of years ago. But, like all good scare stories, trivial things like officials of major hotel chains saying that their cards do not have, and have never had, any personal information on them -- and, for that matter, the simple logic that would lead one to question why a keycard would be coded with hotel records that have nothing to do with its function of unlocking doors -- are not enough to counteract the wild imaginings of the scare-mongers.
As for the people who say "trust some blogger who says he heard this from a guy who just happens to be saying exactly what was going around on some email rumor a few years ago"... read this post and this one and this one and this one and this one and this onethis one and this one and last but not least, this one from people who have actually worked with them.
The hotel doesn't care when you opened your door. They care when the guy with a master key (or master card, these days) who shouldn't have been in there opened your door, and stole your laptop.
The problem is, nobody has ever actually documented a hotel doing this. It's all "someone said that someone else at a conference told them" stuff. FOAF. You can't make a list if you don't have names to put on it, and so far nobody seems to have found any.
Are you reading the same article the rest of us are?
The Snopes article quotes a newspaper who quotes a public oficial who says that a nameless speaker at some conference said that six of the cards he tested had private information.
So, you're assuming the newspaper got its facts right (remember this story from a few days ago where an "expert" was quoted as saying "...a similar mechanism to lightning, where you have clouds rubbing together..."), the person who attended the conference got her facts right, and the conference speaker got his facts right, and none of the three of them was deliberately misleading, and then using that as "evidence" to contradict numerous opposing statements in the Snopes article and here on Slashdot from hotel companies, people who have actually worked with the equipment, etc.
Yes, the point of the Snopes article was that you will probably never find a CC number on a key card. Plus, that story has been around for years; if it's such a problem, how come we've never heard of it being exploited?
If 10 people who stayed at the Bates Motel all have their CC info stolen in a period of time, their CC companies are going to be looking very suspiciously at the Bates Motel. Someone from the Loss Prevention department at one or more CC companies will want to have a chat with Mr. Bates. He'll ask questions like "Where do you keep records of your customers credit card numbers?"... and even if ol' Norman lies, the next hotel or the one after that is going to admit to the CC company that they put those numbers on the keycards, the CC company is going to come down on them like a ton of lead bricks, and then they're going to demand that the entire hotel industry that this immediately cease. And an industry-wide change like that is not something that could be done in secret -- too many people would have to know. But there has been been no whisper of any such emergency procedure change or system patch. So, it stands to reason that it probably didn't happen... and that data probably wasn't on the cards to begin with.
And I'm still trying to figure out how two masses of flying water droplets could rub together... or how you could tell if they did.
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing as you don't know if I'm even American, I think your reply is a bit ill-thought-out.
As for people "allowing" Bush's election, I'm curious as to what you suggest they should have done. Are you faulting everyone who did not martyr themselves in some kind of armed insurrection? Do you think the aftermath of such an act would lead to more freedom rather than less? At what point should they have done it? When he was first elected? He only looked like a second-rate president, not a nascent tyrant; the erosion of freedom has come one grain of sand at a time. His second term? By then he was too entrenched for anything short of (and possibly including) the aforementioned armed insurrection to pry him out.
In addition, your statement is self-contradictory. You say that Americans got what they said they wanted -- but you also acknowledge that Bush was not elected by the majority of the popular vote. Which is it? More voters didn't want Bush in office than did want him, so at best the majority is getting what the minority deserves.
What concerns me is that the Bush administration is not acting like it is approaching the end of a term and contemplating the possible, even probable, transfer of power to the opposition party. Instead, it is taking steps that only seem logical if it, not any successor, intends to remain in office. Anyone want to start a betting pool on when the Reichstag fire will be?
The nuke will not be ticking. The person who delivered it there will also be the person who pushes the button to set it off. What, you think an organization that specializes in suicide bombers wouldn't be able to find someone to do that?
The whole "ticking bomb" scenario is a straw man. Any organization with basically competent operational security (which is something that Al-Qaida has demonstrated) will compartmentalize essential information so that no one person can compromise the whole plan. Well, except for the man carrying the nuke, but if you catch him he just pushes the button.
And assuming for the moment you do have a "ticking bomb" scenario, and you've got the guy who can lead you to the bomb, all he has to do is run out the clock. It's amazing how much a person can endure if they know they only have to do it for some definite time, even if they don't expect to get a free ticket to Paradise out of it.
There is a story I read years ago, possibly in a science fiction magazine, that I'd like to track down, and can't. I believe the title was "Citizen Torturer" but I've been unable to find any reference at all to anything by that name. The basic premise was that ordinary citizens were recruited and trained as official government torturers for just such "ticking bomb" scenarios, and their purpose was gradually expanded until they were doing such things as torturing a group of office workers, knowing all but one of them were innocent, to find the one who was embezzling. That is chillingly like what we've seen with everything from the RICO Act to these National Security Letters. First the extraordinary power is for a specific, worthy goal, such as going after the Mafia, then it is broadened to apply to other sorts of "bad guys", and in the end it is turned against ordinary citizens. I want to read that story again, so if anyone can give me any information -- the name, the author, anything -- I would very much appreciate it.
I don't live in Spain, but I know this sort of thing is coming to the US sooner or later.
... but, in the US, was "unable to find" active, popular performers to give them their licensing fees a couple of years ago, until the NY state attorney general gave them a not-so-gentle reminder.
Why it's unfair:
I have hundreds of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, and a few flash chips, sitting around me here. Not a single one of them contains any illicit material whatsoever. They're backups of my data, copies of my digital photographs, etc. My printers are used to print content I generate. My scanner is used to scan my clients' materials or stuff that needs to be faxed. I bought a couple of blank VHS tapes the other day -- to tape (with the help of a little IR camera) the nocturnal antics of a couple of my pet mice.
It is unjust that someone who has done nothing wrong, who has not even considered doing anything wrong, should be punished under the ASSUMPTION that they are going to do something wrong. It's not even "guilty until proven innocent", it's "guilty with no way to prove innocence".
Don't say that that I, or people like me, "deserve" that punishment because other people have done something wrong. Collective punishment is totally unjust. Nobody deserves to be punished for something that they neither did nor had any control over.
Why should someone like me be forced to give money to musicians whose music I hate, creators of TV shows that I wouldn't watch if the alternative was a test pattern, and so on, just because I need blank media to store and distribute my photographs, back up my data, or videotape my marathon-running rodents? Why should someone filming their kid's dance recital or soccer tournament have to pay money to someone whose music is banned in their house? Why should my elderly mother-in-law have to pay N.W.A. or Britney Spears to take pictures of her own grandkids?
This is nothing but a money grab. And no, it's not a money grab for the people who actually created the work in question; it's a money grab for the industry organization that "supports" them
Never mind taxation without representation -- fight punishment without so much as evidence, let alone conviction, and no right of appeal.
As it happens, I'm a GoDaddy customer. I've also dealt with Network Solutions and MelbourneIT. GoDaddy stands head and shoulders above both of those big-name, big-rep registrars in terms of service, value for the money, and especially ethics. It wasn't GoDaddy who refused to give Panix their domain name back when it got jacked due to Melbourne's own sloppiness. GoDaddy doesn't send out fake "rewnewal" notices for domains owned by other registrars. And it certainly wasn't GoDaddy who tried to convince us SiteFinder was for our benefit. I'm not saying GoDaddy is a bunch of saints -- they're not, they're a bunch of businessmen -- but they're head and shoulders above the competition, ethics-wise.
They're also the only registrar I know of, and one of the damn few businesses of any type, where you can go yell at the big cheese personally. Bob Parsons and I have exchanged words a time or two via his blog. I suspect if I called up GoDaddy and wanted to talk to him, they'd put me through.
Oh, as to how they can sell domain names below cost: The actual offer is a domain for $1.99 when you buy a non-domain product, such as a hosting contract. They make money on that in exactly the way the Friendly's down the street from me is making money off a free ice cream sundae when you buy a chicken platter. Nothing shady about that, just a "buy a big thing, get a little thing cheap/free" deal like millions of other businesses offer every day. They make their money off of regular priced domain names (not much each, but their volume is incredible) and all of their other products and services, from software to hosting.
No, I don't work for GoDaddy, I'm just one of their customers. All the money flows from me to them, not the other way around. But I just got sick of all the speculation, insinuations, baseless assumptions, and general-purpose bashing from uninformed people who know nothing more about GoDaddy and its business practices than what they read in Slashdot comments.
I don't read Slashdot much anymore, and this kind of thing is one of the reasons why. Come on, guys, we're better than this. Or at least we used to be.
So, all players would have to do the same things in game to achieve the same rewards, instead of some people bypassing the game and just buying those rewards. Would you say the same thing about a dupe bug? It has the same effect.
I didn't say they were playing more than once. What I said was that the farming characters are in play 24/7. So while they appear to be a small percentage of the population, they have a much greater impact than their numbers would indicate. With the numbers I used, one farmer would have the economic strength of about 30 ordinary players.
Joe Average plays 4 hours a day, of which an hour is spent spamming the LFG channel, other maintenance activities, talking with friends, etc. Fred Farmer plays 24 hours a day (multiple farming company employees working 8-hour shifts) and except for occasional breaks to mail farmed items off to the storage/sales mule, all 24 hours of that is spent farming gold or items. Why is it difficult for you to comprehend that farming for 24 hours produces more gold and items than farming for 4 hours?
No, but they have 24 hours a day to do the farming while the average player has (pulling a number out of thin air here) 4 hours. Also, the professional farmers are doing nothing but farming, while the ordinary player is doing quests, helping out a couple of guildies, checking out the AH, looking for a group, doing an instance run where he gets nothing but some BOP paladin plate (and he's a shaman), etc. The average player's gold/item generation efficiency is terrible.
Yes, because then in-game wealth would be proportional to the effort expended, skill acquired, and time committed by the player, rather than to their real-world wealth and their willingness to cheat. Also, that's the game the way Blizzard designed the game, and the way the majority of players want to be able to play it. Even most of the ones buying gold from the farming companies, at least the ones I know, would prefer that nobody could buy gold rather than that everybody could. (of course, their ideal situation is nobody but themselves buying gold) If Blizzard had wanted World of Warcraft to be a Warcraft-themed version of Second Life, that's the game they would have made, and we would have made our buying decisions based on that. But they didn't, and we didn't, and we want the game we were promised where what we can do, not what we can spend, is what counts.
Here's the important part, though: The game management makes decisions which necessarily take farming into
The farmers generate the majority of high-end items sold in the game, and collude to keep the prices high. If someone undercuts them, they buy the item and repost it higher. These are not random individuals, remember; these are rooms full of people working for large corporations.
Does anyone have any figures on how well SOE's Station Exchange in EQ2 is actually working? As I understand it (totally anecodatally here) they expected to be able to expand the system to more/most servers, and instead the SE-enabled servers are struggling and losing rather than gaining players. Any evidence (or even further anecdotes) about what's really happening would be appreciated.
People, as a rule, want to play a game where their particular abilities give them an edge over other players. People with fast reflexes, for instance, gravitate towards "twitch" games such as FPS games. People who are good at tracking multiple things at once enjoy detail-oriented games such as RTS games. And people whose edge is a lack of ethics, a willingness to cheat, prefer games in which other people do not cheat. Imagine a competitive FPS server which advertised that all hacks, aimbots, tracking bots, etc., were permitted. A few people might come try it out, just out of curiousity, but nobody would stay to play. The bot-users, etc., want an environment where nobody else is using them, where they have an edge. That's why Station Exchange is doomed to fail in the long run. Most people don't want the Sword of Uberness just because they think it looks neat; they want it because it will give them an edge over other players. Even in PvE, it's easier to get groups, and you perform better in groups, with better gear. But if the Sword of Uberness is available to anyone with cash (or, more important, more cash than you have) what's the point? You don't have that edge after all, because I.G.E. has teams in-game farming 24/7 so anyone can have a Sword of Uberness, they just have to buy it from I.G.E.
Just like a wolf wants to be surrounded by sheep, not other wolves, and a griefer wants to be surrounded by victims, not other griefers, cheaters (including gold buyers) want to be surrounded by non-cheaters. It's not an advantage if everybody is doing it. Since Station Exchange is basically cheating-enabled servers, the cheaters are going to play anywhere and everywhere else.
It affects everyone's play experience for a number of reasons:
For one thing, the gold farmers concentrate exclusively on producing gold. They are not playing, they are working, and as such devote all of their time to gathering more gold. Therefore, they naturally make more gold per hour than ordinary players, often many times more. In addition, in many cases multiple players are playing the same account to keep the farming going 24/7. This is a multiplying factor. If we say that a commercial farmer is 5x more efficient than the average player at generating gold (and that's probably an understatement) and plays around the clock versus, say, 4 hours a night for the average player, we're looking at a single farming account generating as much gold as 30 ordinary players. So it's not just a matter of the money being already in the economy but changing hands; there's a lot more being produced.
For another, the same ratio applies to the production of items, especially the rare and epic items that are bind-on-equip world drops. So if 5% of the population of your server is commercial farmers (and from my experience tracking farmers in WoW, that's the right order of magnitude) those 5% are producing more items, half again more, than the entire population of legitimate players combined. This gives them massive power to control the market, further increased by the fact that they sell virtually all the sellable items they get, rather than using them as upgrades to their own gear when possible as ordinary players would. Normally the increased supply of items would drive down prices, but the items are in the hands of the gold farmers, who collude to keep prices high.
With the help of this economic advantage, they have partial control of the market. They sell high, and if someone is selling items cheaper, they buy up those items and resell them, too. The resulting high prices drive more players to buying gold from the RMT companies. So they sell the gold for real-world cash, and then get it back again from selling overpriced items, and except for that part bled off by AH fees, etc., they keep circulating it around, getting their payment in RL cash every time it passes through their hands. It's a can't-lose situation for them. Furthermore, in a PvP game, the ever-increasing inflation brought on by the RMT gold sales means that players either have to devote insane amounts of time to earning gold, or just give up and buy it from the RMT companies. So the cycle continues.
Then we get to the farmers themselves. I have known quite a few of them, and with very few exceptions, they are not nice people. Making friends is no part of the job. Their goal is to get as much gold as possible as quickly as possible, by any means possible. When they are not soloing Maraudon, they parasitize pickup groups in high-level instances. They make up the vast majority of the ninja looters I have known. They don't care about their long-term reputation, because they don't need to get into an endgame guild, and pickup groups are often desperate enough to take anyone who's available. Besides, the account will probably get banned soon enough anyway (RIP Claing), before a spreading reputation as a ninja cuts down on their grouping options. Even when they're not ninja looting, grabbing chests, etc., they are less fun than average in a group because few of them speak English, so they can't participate in group chat or understand instructions, and many of them are not competent group players because they're accustomed to soloing or grouping with people in the same physical room with them.
They have taken over substantial areas of the game. Since the implementation of PvP rewards this hasn't been so bad, but at one point Azshara was, on my server at least, exclusively owned by the gold farmers. They camped the Legashi satyr camps 24/7, and had gank squads of rogues on standby to ensure that ownership. If you were Horde they called in the Alliance gankers, and vise versa -- most likely merely a matter of shouting t
Your suggestion would work, but not for the reason you think.
... but you'd be permadead. Kind of useless, no?
It would work because there would be no use for gold other than paying for repairs and buying the occasional item from an NPC. If you couldn't transfer gold without permanently killing the character giving up the gold, then you couldn't use your hard-earned gold to buy one of those nice pearl-handled daggers that my rogue just put up on the Orgrimmar AH. You'd have the dagger
Allowing gold transfer only through AH sales wouldn't help, either; the gold buyers would just put up trash items for the intended transfer amount, and the seller would buy them. Trying to defeat that by artificially capping the price of items would require repeated transactions, but the same result, and make a mess of the economy as well. Preventing any non-AH transfers of items between players (to prevent returning the item to be re-'sold') would reduce that, but by that point, you've broken your game so badly that your problem is no longer gold sellers, it's players, or the lack thereof.
I have another character that I played for awhile as a "tourist" on a carebear server. That character is level 27, and has roughly 200 gold.
When my regular server was down for extra hours after maintenance, I made a newbie on another server just to try out a paladin. As of this morning, that character was level 14 and had 22 gold.
I have never bought so much as a bent copper piece for real-world cash. A RL friend who was quitting the game gave me some of his stuff, mostly herbs, worth maybe 200g maximum, but other than that, I've earned every copper of it.
So yes, people are farming 570, or 1000, or 4400 gold. I've had over 5000 at times, usually just before a gear-buying spree. And every last copper piece of that has come from a drop from a mob, from the sale of an item, or from a fee for services (enchanting, lockpicking, etc.) I have never, nor will I ever, buy gold for real-world cash. I will not support the greedy parasites who are destroying the games that I love.
Besides, it's a game -- a competition -- and gold is how I keep score. My "score" in WoW would be meaningless if I just went to eBay and bought points.
I see that you mention in your second post that you don't know who Jack Thompson is. Sadly, he is in fact one of the "radicalist nutjobs" you refer to.
Yeah, right - stop pretending you're immune, that you'd notice at all, or behave any differently if you did.
Actually, I have personally been in that situation. And I behaved very much like the people on the MGS forums did: I talked to the person, tried to talk him out of it, and used the information I had to contact the real-world forces (cops, in this case) who could and would help. I was luckier than Kuja's friends; the person in question is still alive. But I've been tested in that fire, and I know what I would do, because I have done it.
That's what really happened -- not what Jack Thompson, in his twisted way, is telling people happened. The people who knew that troubled young man did more than "get up from their computer"; they did everything in their power, individually and collectively, to help him. They did what they could, but it wasn't enough, and their community is bleeding. All of us who have been touched by this, or a tragedy or near-tragedy like it, hurt along with them.
Then Jack Thompson jumps into this pain, the pain both of Mitch's online friends who tried to save him and failed, and his offline family who shared his life, who found his body, who are devastated. He, a man who has devoted his life to destroying video games (or at least to being paid a lot of money for pushing lawsuits against game companies) has his own "answers". According to him, Mitch died because he didn't follow Mr. Thompson's religion. He died because one of his hobbies happened to be playing computer games. One wonders, if it turns out that he also played basketball, would Jack Thompson wage war against that, too?
And then Mr. Thompson turns his bile on the people who are already in agony over their inability to help a friend when he needed it the most. The surivivors of a suicide are vulnerable themselves; they torment themselves thinking they could have done something more, seen something they missed, something, anything. So Mr. "Compassionate Christian" /spit Thompson rubs salt into their wounds. He denies that they did anything at all. He accuses them of not caring, of not trying. And he knows what he's doing.
I'm sure at some point in your life, NoMaster, you have had the experience of someone -- a parent, a teacher, a boss -- accusing you of not trying when you know you poured all you had into something. Mine was a boss who dismissed a project I sweated blood over for weeks as trivial, not even worth his time to review. There is a special sort of pain that goes with that, pain that abusive parents and spouses know well how to inflict. When it concerns not just a term paper or a work project but the life of a friend, the pain is indescribable. A decent, compassionate, moral person would acknowledge what those hurting people, those family and friends, are going through, would acknowledge that they tried their best, would console them -- not accuse them of not caring, of never trying at all, of causing the very thing that has torn their hearts open. That is not "a wonderful thing". That is viciousness on a master level. It is on a par with the fatherless sons of diseased dogs who line up outside the funerals of people who have died of AIDS and scream at the bereaved families that their son, their brother, their beloved, is burning in hell. It's not about getting anyone to think -- it's about hurting for the sheer sadistic joy of hurting another human being.
You, as you say, are not a gamer. You are not a part of these little communities of ours. I'm not sure that anyone who has never participated in one can really understand what it is like. Just as there were people a century ago who maintained a friendship by postal correspondence for years or decades, so we have our friends we have never met in the physical world. We might not know their real names, but we know their hopes, t
Somewhere in the US, at a rate of almost one per day, a World of Warcraft player tragically takes his own life.
No, no, don't lynch me yet. I'm a WoW player myself, and on the side of the good guys. I'm just spinning some statistics here to give you an idea of the numbers involved, and hopefully to have some ammunition against the likes of Jack /spit Thompson.
Here's the (very rough) numbers:
The US suicide rate is roughly 12 per 100,000 people. It varies by age group, but for the sake of discussion let's assume that it's approximately correct for the demographic of WoW players. While I'm assuming things, let's also say that there are 2 million WoW players in the US. (it's been a while since I've seen figures, but with 5 million worldwide, that should be in the right ballpark)
2 million players, .012% of them commit suicide annually, that's 240 a year, or 20 a month. Tens of people a month ... hundreds per year ... that's a lot of people. A lot of tragedies. Enough to touch every faction on every server.
But here's the catch: You could probably generate roughly similar figures on WoW players being elected to public office, winning the lottery, or being murdered. When you're talking about millions of people, ANYTHING happens in non-trivial numbers. Pull those numbers out of context, though, and you can make them look like whatever you want them to. You just have to spin the numbers fast enough and hope your readers don't think for themselves.
Of course, made-up "facts" are a lot more lurid than the real truth. They're a lot more "newsworthy" than the things that really happen, the things that we as people who happen to play online games have seen and done. I am far from the only gamer who has sat up all night talking, listening, to a depressed kid who I only knew as text on a screen, with no possible means of contact except that fragile thread of words. There are a couple of people alive today who might not be if they hadn't had me, or someone else they knew in-game, to talk to. One is for sure: some of our mutual friends (I wasn't around at the time) tracked down his parents and got him hauled to the hospital in time. Of course, "Gamer Sits Up All Night Listening To Depressed Friend" just doesn't have the "oomph!" for a good headline. "Teenage Gamer Doesn't Commit Suicide" won't sell many papers. Making stuff up, on the other hand, seems to work very well.
Hundreds of thousands of people read Slashdot. Statistics being what they are, the odds are pretty good some of them will be journalists. Some of those will be shady journalists. If you happen to be one of them, think about this the next time you're tempted to make something like this up: Is it really worth selling papers if the price is the pain inflicted on a person's family, friends, and community when they read your lies?
And since the applications do not have any integrated security such as VPN technology, the passwords to these accounts are often stored in clear text (not encrypted), thus becoming visible to developers, support staff and anyone that has access to the application code.
Just what do they think the connection is between using VPN (fundamentally a communications protocol) and whether or not a password is embedded in the source code? *sigh* The impression I've gotten of the whole article, reinforced by things like that sentence, is that it exemplifies the saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
"Highly toxic and radioactive" implies both highly toxic and highly radioactive. That is absolutely not the case. While uranium, like any heavy metal, is toxic if ingested, it's not only not highly radioactive, it's bordering on inert. Because almost all the U-235, the active isotope, is gone, it's far less radioactive than uranium in its unrefined form.
Half-life and radioactivity are inversely related. The more radioactive an element is, the shorter its half-life is. For those who don't remember the definition, half-life is the time it takes for half of the atoms in a substance to undergo radioactive decay. Therefore, something that is emitting radiation at a high rate -- that is, undergoing a lot of atomic decay -- is necessarily going to have a short half-life; something with a long half-life is mostly sitting there, and once in a while a nucleus decays. In the case of U-238 (which constitutes 99.8%+ of depleted uranium) in four and a half billion years, roughly half the atoms in your sample will have ejected an alpha particle and turned into lead. The other half have just been sitting there, doing nothing, being inert, for four and a half billion years. As radioactive materials go, that's pushing pretty close to not radioactive at all. In fact, depleted uranium is used for radiation shielding to block gamma rays!
Now, with regard to those alpha particles: they're flying helium nuclei. They're not very good at penetrating things. Like, oh, skin. Paper. Substantial amounts of air. Try it yourself sometime: get your hands on an alpha source (your local antique shop can probably supply you with a piece of red Fiesta Ware pottery) and a Geiger counter (surplus stores often have them). Put the Geiger counter's tube by the Fiesta Ware, listen to the nice clicking. Now put a sheet of notebook paper between them. The clicking stops.
He'd have had to be eating the depleted uranium to get anywhere close to that level of exposure. At which point, he'd be dead from heavy metal poisoning already, so any radiation wouldn't be an issue. Remember, something doesn't become radioactive from being exposed to alpha particles. You need slow neutrons for that, and U-238 is not a good slow neutron source. Enough slow neutrons to make a human being radioactive will also make him dead. Enough depleted uranium in the body to produce measurable radioactivity will kill him just like a large amount of lead, mercury, or other heavy metal.
As for "5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation"
Too much scary writing, too many misstatements, and too many numbers that just don't add up.
But when I select Help->About in Windows, there is no message giving me (the user) the right to redistribute copies of the software, which is what a GPL program does. (As GPL programs with either a splashscreen or an About box are required to print a message of that nature)
You didn't answer my question:
If you come over to my house and use my computer to read Slashdot, am I somehow distributing Windows?
Yes? Or no?
That has been particularly popular amoung Islamic real-estate buyers, because their religion forbids all leasing.
And once again, you're talking out of your ass.
An example.
Let's look at this from the other direction.
This particular computer happens to be running Windows. Microsoft's license, of course, prohibits me from distributing Windows. If you come over to my house and use my computer to read Slashdot, am I somehow distributing Windows?
Corporations are not alive. They are not human, they are not people.
Actually, corporation are people. It's one of the more bizarre aspects of US law, but corporations are people. You're confusing "people" as a generality with natural people, which are the kind that walk and talk and bleed. If you ever seen something -- say, a contest entry form or a MMORPG user agreement -- which restricts usage to a "natural person" that's to exclude corporations, because otherwise "person" would mean an entire corporation, too.
...or to sell, lease, or assign a product
...declaring "I am not distributing this program to you, even though I am placing these CD-ROMs into your hands, because I am retaining ownership of them. Not only will you not get the source code, but also I can demand back the binaries at any future time." is as good an example of a lease as I've seen lately.
You just shot your own argument through the head. Your example of
I quit using Yahoo search when they started charging to be included in it. I want to search all available websites, not just those run by companies who can pay multi-hundred-dollar fees.
According to Snopes, the cards actually do have nothing except a magick code to open the door, an expiration date, and sometimes a yes/no flag to say if you're allowed to charge things to your room or not.
... read this post and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one this one and this one and last but not least, this one from people who have actually worked with them.
This whole thing seems to go back to a very dubious and undocumented story that was passed around the Pasadena police department a number of years ago. But, like all good scare stories, trivial things like officials of major hotel chains saying that their cards do not have, and have never had, any personal information on them -- and, for that matter, the simple logic that would lead one to question why a keycard would be coded with hotel records that have nothing to do with its function of unlocking doors -- are not enough to counteract the wild imaginings of the scare-mongers.
As for the people who say "trust some blogger who says he heard this from a guy who just happens to be saying exactly what was going around on some email rumor a few years ago"
The hotel doesn't care when you opened your door. They care when the guy with a master key (or master card, these days) who shouldn't have been in there opened your door, and stole your laptop.
The problem is, nobody has ever actually documented a hotel doing this. It's all "someone said that someone else at a conference told them" stuff. FOAF. You can't make a list if you don't have names to put on it, and so far nobody seems to have found any.
Are you reading the same article the rest of us are?
... and even if ol' Norman lies, the next hotel or the one after that is going to admit to the CC company that they put those numbers on the keycards, the CC company is going to come down on them like a ton of lead bricks, and then they're going to demand that the entire hotel industry that this immediately cease. And an industry-wide change like that is not something that could be done in secret -- too many people would have to know. But there has been been no whisper of any such emergency procedure change or system patch. So, it stands to reason that it probably didn't happen ... and that data probably wasn't on the cards to begin with.
... or how you could tell if they did.
The Snopes article quotes a newspaper who quotes a public oficial who says that a nameless speaker at some conference said that six of the cards he tested had private information.
So, you're assuming the newspaper got its facts right (remember this story from a few days ago where an "expert" was quoted as saying "...a similar mechanism to lightning, where you have clouds rubbing together..."), the person who attended the conference got her facts right, and the conference speaker got his facts right, and none of the three of them was deliberately misleading, and then using that as "evidence" to contradict numerous opposing statements in the Snopes article and here on Slashdot from hotel companies, people who have actually worked with the equipment, etc.
Yes, the point of the Snopes article was that you will probably never find a CC number on a key card. Plus, that story has been around for years; if it's such a problem, how come we've never heard of it being exploited?
If 10 people who stayed at the Bates Motel all have their CC info stolen in a period of time, their CC companies are going to be looking very suspiciously at the Bates Motel. Someone from the Loss Prevention department at one or more CC companies will want to have a chat with Mr. Bates. He'll ask questions like "Where do you keep records of your customers credit card numbers?"
And I'm still trying to figure out how two masses of flying water droplets could rub together