Hell, I'd even play the current 99c for unencumbered songs (even decent-quality Mp3s). My wife's player doesn't read the DRMed WMA crap that most sites sell (it handles plain WMAs fine), and while I know I can burn-rip to Mp3, I am not paying for extra hassle just so I can enjoy my own music.
I've introduced both games to my circle of friends (mostly couples). Catan has really caught on, although the one time we played Puerto Rico it didn't get good reviews. I think it is because Puerto Rico, without dice, is really driven by the choices one has to make (like chess, you really have to plan a few moves ahead to be successful). In Catan, you can always blame bad performance on the dice (although IMO initial settlement placement and negotiations with your fellow players trumps the dice in most games).
Plus I think Puerto Rico is a bit intimidating to new players, once they see all the components laid out on the table and the large selection of buildings. When we played, I only briefly went over the functions of all the buildings (I didn't play that first game, and tried to help everyone learn the rules), and I think a few friends got frustrated that they made bad choices early on. It's too bad that they didn't like the game, since I think that Puerto Rico has more depth to it in the long run.
My wife and I recently decided that we'd like to get involved in purchasing songs online. Unfortunately, I have not found a service that suits my desire for DRM-free music that is easy to move between my diverse media players. Musicmatch came with my system, and looks like a nice service in terms of selection and price, but my wife's player is not on the Approved Player list that can handle the Windows Media DRMed files (it handles mp3s and regular WMA files just fine). It seems that all of the sites have some kind of restriction to a particular set of players.
I'm not really interested in going through a burn-rip routine to enjoy music I've bought. Nor am I particularly interested in going outside the country to sites of dubious legality, like allofmp3.com. My wife and I buy very few CDs, and most of those are from local independent bands that we've heard at local venues.
So we're a potential market for the record companies, but they aren't getting our business, and they won't as long as their protection scheme remains as restrictive as it is currently.
Yeah, but Californians just voted to spend 3 billion dollars on stem cell research. It's already starting to look like a feeding frenzy; I just hope that at least half the money ends up going to real research.
That looks like a good source, with some interesting articles... of course, it's the "Plasma TV Buying Guide," so what are they going to say, "plasmas suck, don't get one"? Based on the amount of advertising there, it looks like the site is hardly unbiased.
Actually, from what I've heard they pay closer to 60 cents on the dollar to the RIAA/company, of which maybe 8 cents makes its way to the artist.
Those services that used a 50c/song short-term model to grab market share were operating at a loss. Even iTunes hasn't made profit AFAIK; it's mainly a vehicle to sell Ipods.
I thought this was a good observation. The media companies no doubt know that they're walking a fine line, bribing the government to pass teh laws they want, pushing the consumer a bit at a time and hoping not to provoke the backlash that could undo all their work. It's the old story about distracting the lazy masses with bread and circuses. In our modern society we've got plenty of bread, so if they mess with our circuses too much, they might be in trouble. It's interesting to me that even people who are fairly poor (by American standards) will often have a big-screen TV, VCR, DVD player, and sometimes a PVR as well. The media conglomerates have gotten their way thus far, but there's an invisible point beyond which the common couch-potato slob will get roused from his plush chair and do something. The difficulty for everyone is that nobody really knows exactly where that point is.
I'd be willing to wager that for every anecdotal example of a "virtuous" transfer of royalties to charity or needy heirs, there are 100 if not a 1000 cases where an author got screwed out of his/her income when they were transfered to a corporate entity who refused to pass profits onto the author.
I know that it's incumbent upon the producer of content to be in some ways responsible for what he/she does with it (it takes two parties to sign a contract, after all), but face it: in most cases the media companies have huge leverage over those who want to break into the industry.
Let's make all copyrights non-transferable and expirable upon death. If you're old and refuse to write because you think you'll die before you extract the full profits from the work... well, tough cookies.
Copyright isn't a "legal fiction" but it does make a bargin with the creators in the world; give temporary control over your work in exchange for sharing it with the world. When so many (napster-heads, fan fiction authors, warez distributers, cover bands, photoshoppers, etc) refuse implicitly recognize the legal authority of a law, one has to question its status as "natural law."
Indeed; I'm am an (amateur) writer and I have a lot of respect for the efforts of creators of media content (whether writers, artists, songwriters/musicians, or filmmakers). But at the same time I am disgusted by the extreme nature of the current copyright schema, and I find myself increasingly sympathetic to those who flout it. I suppose if I wanted to be internally consistent, I would advocate only defiance of copyrights that would have been public domain today under the "old domain" before the most recent rounds of extensions (heck, if it were up to me, I'd go back to 14+14).
There will always be copyright infringement in this modern era; digital media is just too easy to copy regardless of DRM. But I think that those of us who prefer to be honest and respect the rights of creators (I'd like to think this is a majority of society, maybe I'm naive) would have an easier time of it if copyrights were:
a) Limited to a fixed term, or even life + a few years, and
b) Non-transferable (i.e. ultimate rights retained by author, and not saleable to a corporate entity). I realize that this would require some redefinition of the current relationships between content producers and distributors of content.
I'm already starting to see it in the role-playing games industry. Due to the advent of PDF publishing, and the ability to design solid, professional-quality content on an average home PC, there are many, many, small third-party publishers producing content in this area. Sure, it varies in quality, and a lot of it only sells a few hundred copies, but most people are doing it because they love the games and enjoy the process. And the formation of online communities (I frequent ENWorld.org) allows for some filtering of the content, allowing the best stuff to rise to the top and the chaff to fade away.
I see something similar evolving in the music industry, personally, but I think that the death-throes of the RIAA are going to go on for quite some time. But already people can produce a quality album on a consumer PC, with the right software and hardware configuration. Already sites dedicated to independent acts exist, and will only grow as people get tired of spending the inflated prices demanded of the marketing machines of the RIAA labels.
My wife and I have had several musical acts in our home, for groups of friends. One was a friend who is a semi-professional flutist, who played for dinner; the other was a small local band (3 musicians) who we'd seen a few local cafes/small clubs whom we'd befriended and invited to play for some small $. We've also bought their albums and promoted their music to our circle of friends. We have a pretty good local music scene in Sacramento, and one of our favorite local performers, Jackie Greene, just signed with a major label. We've also been fans of groups like Cake, who started local but who were able to get national exposure (my wife, who's lived here longer than me, saw them several times when they were still playing in local bars). There are numerous other local bands who may never "break out" but who are still enjoyable to us and other local fans. On an average weekend, our local paper's entertainment section advertises maybe 50 local musical performances, of a variety of genres. They are almost always well-attended, so people don't seem as worried about "risking their hard earned money" as you suggest.
And I think that the parent's point (or at least what I got out of it) is that the Internet offers new possibilities for direct distribution of content. I think it's still in its infancy, and there needs to be an easy mechanism for making small instant payments to an artist in exchange for DLing their songs, but P2P and existing music services offer a workable prototype for a future model of finding, testing, and acquiring new music directly from the artist. Once you eliminate the need for blitz marketing (radio, TV, teen mags, all infusing your content into pop culture), the need for an organization like RIAA is less pressing. It's better (IMHO, your opinion may differ) to have 100,000s of local, small-scale artists (who each present their materials to the public through various means in live performances and Internet music communities tailored to various interests) each getting 5 cents per sale off maybe 1000 sales than the current model where you have a select few artists who are part of the media "machine" who are extensive promoted, and nominally get a buck per album off many sales. Sure, they may not hit as big as one of the products of the RIAA machine today, but the talented ones may develop a decent following through word of mouth and things like fan sites. In reality, with all but the most popular artists indemnified to the label and having to work off an advance before they can make an actual profit, many artists are little more than serfs, without ownership of their own intellectual property (which gets signed over to the label), and with few options until they are able to break out and become a top-list band.
Personally, I'm not against copyright per se. But I think that it needs to stay in the hands of the artist, who should retain control of his/her creative product. Technology has evolved to the point where mass media distribution isn't absolutely necessary; now society just needs to catch up. I think that the runaway popularity of P2P indicates that many of us are already there. I know critics will just point and call P2P users selfish thieves, and I'm sure many couldn't care less about the artist as long as they get their free content. But I think many would be willing to click to send the artists a small chunk of money, if it went directly to them, instead of to the mass media distribution machine. Heck, even iTunes is hugely popular, even though (IIRC) the artist only gets 6-8 cents for every dollar that you spend for a song. Imagine if the songs cost only 20 cents, but the artist got 18-19 cents, with a small commission for the site handling the transaction. Without the need for marketing, physical production of media, and the payment of suits, this is completely possible today. Under this model few artists would get hugely rich, but many would be able to make a fair sum of money doing something that they love and enjoy.
That would also make it more likely to have at least some third parties represented in the national government. Combine your suggestion with a neutral districting schema (i.e. don't leave it up to legislators to draw up the districts), and I'd support it.
Ha ha, that's a good one. "Government waste" is such a commonly-repeated cliche, most people believe it always applies. Fact is (read the article), SSA is one of the most efficient government programs there is (something like 99.2% of the program costs goes directly to benefits). Far more efficient than most private charities, anyway, some of which spend up to 20% of their operating budget on "administration" and another 20-40% on "fundraising".
As for "promoting irresponsibility", when SSA was created, there were a whole lot of people who were poor without being lazy slackabouts (remember the Great Depression?). There will always be lazy people trying to suck at the public teat, but it's not like SSA payments let you live like a prince, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Agreed, and since SS taxes are capped at a certain level (IIRC it's about 90k), the very rich get the benefits of having people not be destitute for a smaller portion of their total income.
A lot of well-off people consider taxes to be handouts to lazy cheapskates, but they never draw the connection between poverty and how much they have to spend on gated communities, burglar alarms, and all the other fear-based industries that thrive whenever the national poverty numbers rise.
"Punish the irresponsible" is a popular refrain these days, but the fact is that we ALL pay the price when people in this country are destitute (whether their "fault" or not). Let's leave aside compassion/morality and look at it from purely practical terms; I'd rather spend some money to have these people floating above the poverty line (and they aren't going to be "living it up" on SS payments!), because when people are truly poor, they are MORE of a drain to the public coffers. Old, poor people tend to be sick a lot, and since they often don't have insurance, who do you think pays for their health care? What about public safety (desperate people tend to commit more crimes), food stamps, etc.?
You'd probably return with a comment suggesting euthenasia or a bullet, but since that isn't going to happen anytime soon in the real world, it makes sense to be preventative to save our tax dollars in the long run.
One thing I do believe firmly is that the average person wont save suffiently if not required to do so.
The other replies to this disagree, but I think this is an absolutely true statement if one examines our current culture today. Everything in media/advertising, etc. encourages people to "live for the moment" and not worry about the long-term. This is particularly true for the young, who tend to live in the "now" more than most. And I agree that our current national record of personal debt would suggest that people in the U.S. would squander their money rather than save for the future, if given the choice.
We all pay the price when old people are destitute, in terms of the drain on public health care and other infrastructure requirements. I agree that people sometimes need to be forced to plan ahead, and would rather spend to see people hover above the poverty line than have to cough up more $ when they fall below it and require all sorts of state intervention to keep them breathing.
I've seen several news pieces on Iraq from various sources (PBS, 60 Minutes), and in most I've seen soldiers riding humvees and/or trucks that had obviously home-made armor plating added. And these were of current/recent (1 month old) events, not last year.
Want to know why the rate of home invasions while the homeowner is home is so low in the US? Because of the high rate of firearms ownership.
By that logic, European countries, which have a firearms ownership rate that is a tiny fraction of the U.S. rate, should have incredibly high home invasion rates.
I don't think your causal link is defensible in this case.
I don't criticize the autobody guy for fixing my car, but if someone from his shop is driving down my street with a bat bashing in the fenders of every parked car, I'm going to be a bit miffed.
Dealing with the consequences of an action and wanting to prevent/amelioriate it beforehand don't have to be mutually exclusive.
Simply put, the USA have a sizeable share of the world's population (1/25?), so the waste heat won't grow more than this factor 25 if everyone started to burn fuel like the average US citizen does.
I don't know the exact numbers, but this can be proven false rather easily with a hypothetical reply. If, say, USAians produce 100 units of output/citizen, and the rest of the world produces 1 unit/citizen, then the total could be expressed in a forumla as 100*(1/25 of total pop)+1*(24/25 of total pop). If everyone produced at the USA level, the total would be 100*total pop, which would be a significantly higher result than 25*current number.
Now, you may be right (I don't know if the US produces 100 times the output as the world average, though I'm sure they definitely exceed that for much of the developing world), but I just wanted to note that your assumption is faulty.
I read the parent and the other comments below it, and I think both sides make a good point. Artists are deserving, and yet at the same time they often are also screwed by the corporations that own their copyrights.
My solution (in addition to reducing copyright terms back to where they were before all these extensions) would be to make copyright non-transferable. I know this would provide some difficulties for artists who need access to corporate distribution channels, but given the new distribution models that the Internet is already opening up, this would be a better system for the 21st century IMO. And it would leave the ultimate control of content in the hands of those who truly deserve it; i.e. the artists.
Yeah, this is why I'm looking forward more to 2006, when Dragon Age and Neverwinter Nights 2 (handed over to Obsidian, although Bioware's still helping a bit from what I've heard) are slated to be finished. But I play more multiplayer than single player, mostly long-running campaigns with small, established groups of players. Neverwinter Nights is still my primary online game in the RPG genre, and I expect that both of my current campaigns will keep going throughout 2005.
This topic is one of the main reasons why I continue to play Neverwinter Nights with a DM and a small group of players, insteading of heading over to Warcraft or another of the big subscription-based worlds. While it loses some of the sponteneity of a MMORPG (since you need to schedule sessions ahead of time), the advantage is that griefers are pretty easy to control. Just the very act of having to schedule a game at a site like http://www.neverwinterconnections.com/ will weed about about 90% of the casual griefers. And then having a DM to appeal to in case of trouble takes care of the rest. As a DM, the worst I've generally had to do is give a player a private warning, and maybe use my DM wand to turn them into a penguin for a minute or two if they got out of hand.
I know some MMORPG's have utilized the DM/GM model but the ratio of players to DMs is much higher, so it's often difficult to get help when you need it.
This is the same reason why I tend to play FPS games on servers that have an admin presence to boot unruly players. I like games that have friendly-fire set to on (forcing you to be careful and work together), but this is almost an invitation to grief unless you have a vigilant admin online. There have been a number of games that were really promising in this genre, but had a tough time because the booting mechanism was so ponderous. I've seen publishers trying to improve this by putting in voting mechanisms for players to boot a PKer, as well as automatic boots for players who rack up too many team kills. These are good steps, but are not yet a substitute for a good admin. One of the best systems I've seen is in Call of Duty, where some servers have a "forgive" system in place where you can do a console command to forgive a player who inadvertently team-kills you. If not forgiven, a player is booted after only a few incidences of team-damage.
The article stated that this was a big challenge for the builder, and that he's tried to account for it by making the lower half of the body heavier than the upper half. Still, it won't be easy to handle the balance aspect. Probably won't be mounting PPCs on it anytime soon.;)
A good reminder on perspective. I see this all the time in my job as well; while my job isn't official tech support I am constantly helping higher-ranking people (and especially administrators) complete basic computer tasks and functions. I don't have a problem with it (contributes to making me indispensible, IMO), although it is amusing sometimes to be called to a cubicle by a frustrated consultant and fix the situation with a single click or button-press.
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Hell, I'd even play the current 99c for unencumbered songs (even decent-quality Mp3s). My wife's player doesn't read the DRMed WMA crap that most sites sell (it handles plain WMAs fine), and while I know I can burn-rip to Mp3, I am not paying for extra hassle just so I can enjoy my own music.
Plus I think Puerto Rico is a bit intimidating to new players, once they see all the components laid out on the table and the large selection of buildings. When we played, I only briefly went over the functions of all the buildings (I didn't play that first game, and tried to help everyone learn the rules), and I think a few friends got frustrated that they made bad choices early on. It's too bad that they didn't like the game, since I think that Puerto Rico has more depth to it in the long run.
I'm not really interested in going through a burn-rip routine to enjoy music I've bought. Nor am I particularly interested in going outside the country to sites of dubious legality, like allofmp3.com. My wife and I buy very few CDs, and most of those are from local independent bands that we've heard at local venues.
So we're a potential market for the record companies, but they aren't getting our business, and they won't as long as their protection scheme remains as restrictive as it is currently.
Yeah, but Californians just voted to spend 3 billion dollars on stem cell research. It's already starting to look like a feeding frenzy; I just hope that at least half the money ends up going to real research.
That looks like a good source, with some interesting articles... of course, it's the "Plasma TV Buying Guide," so what are they going to say, "plasmas suck, don't get one"? Based on the amount of advertising there, it looks like the site is hardly unbiased.
Those services that used a 50c/song short-term model to grab market share were operating at a loss. Even iTunes hasn't made profit AFAIK; it's mainly a vehicle to sell Ipods.
I thought this was a good observation. The media companies no doubt know that they're walking a fine line, bribing the government to pass teh laws they want, pushing the consumer a bit at a time and hoping not to provoke the backlash that could undo all their work. It's the old story about distracting the lazy masses with bread and circuses. In our modern society we've got plenty of bread, so if they mess with our circuses too much, they might be in trouble. It's interesting to me that even people who are fairly poor (by American standards) will often have a big-screen TV, VCR, DVD player, and sometimes a PVR as well. The media conglomerates have gotten their way thus far, but there's an invisible point beyond which the common couch-potato slob will get roused from his plush chair and do something. The difficulty for everyone is that nobody really knows exactly where that point is.
I know that it's incumbent upon the producer of content to be in some ways responsible for what he/she does with it (it takes two parties to sign a contract, after all), but face it: in most cases the media companies have huge leverage over those who want to break into the industry.
Let's make all copyrights non-transferable and expirable upon death. If you're old and refuse to write because you think you'll die before you extract the full profits from the work... well, tough cookies.
Indeed; I'm am an (amateur) writer and I have a lot of respect for the efforts of creators of media content (whether writers, artists, songwriters/musicians, or filmmakers). But at the same time I am disgusted by the extreme nature of the current copyright schema, and I find myself increasingly sympathetic to those who flout it. I suppose if I wanted to be internally consistent, I would advocate only defiance of copyrights that would have been public domain today under the "old domain" before the most recent rounds of extensions (heck, if it were up to me, I'd go back to 14+14).
There will always be copyright infringement in this modern era; digital media is just too easy to copy regardless of DRM. But I think that those of us who prefer to be honest and respect the rights of creators (I'd like to think this is a majority of society, maybe I'm naive) would have an easier time of it if copyrights were:
a) Limited to a fixed term, or even life + a few years, and
b) Non-transferable (i.e. ultimate rights retained by author, and not saleable to a corporate entity). I realize that this would require some redefinition of the current relationships between content producers and distributors of content.
I see something similar evolving in the music industry, personally, but I think that the death-throes of the RIAA are going to go on for quite some time. But already people can produce a quality album on a consumer PC, with the right software and hardware configuration. Already sites dedicated to independent acts exist, and will only grow as people get tired of spending the inflated prices demanded of the marketing machines of the RIAA labels.
And I think that the parent's point (or at least what I got out of it) is that the Internet offers new possibilities for direct distribution of content. I think it's still in its infancy, and there needs to be an easy mechanism for making small instant payments to an artist in exchange for DLing their songs, but P2P and existing music services offer a workable prototype for a future model of finding, testing, and acquiring new music directly from the artist. Once you eliminate the need for blitz marketing (radio, TV, teen mags, all infusing your content into pop culture), the need for an organization like RIAA is less pressing. It's better (IMHO, your opinion may differ) to have 100,000s of local, small-scale artists (who each present their materials to the public through various means in live performances and Internet music communities tailored to various interests) each getting 5 cents per sale off maybe 1000 sales than the current model where you have a select few artists who are part of the media "machine" who are extensive promoted, and nominally get a buck per album off many sales. Sure, they may not hit as big as one of the products of the RIAA machine today, but the talented ones may develop a decent following through word of mouth and things like fan sites. In reality, with all but the most popular artists indemnified to the label and having to work off an advance before they can make an actual profit, many artists are little more than serfs, without ownership of their own intellectual property (which gets signed over to the label), and with few options until they are able to break out and become a top-list band.
Personally, I'm not against copyright per se. But I think that it needs to stay in the hands of the artist, who should retain control of his/her creative product. Technology has evolved to the point where mass media distribution isn't absolutely necessary; now society just needs to catch up. I think that the runaway popularity of P2P indicates that many of us are already there. I know critics will just point and call P2P users selfish thieves, and I'm sure many couldn't care less about the artist as long as they get their free content. But I think many would be willing to click to send the artists a small chunk of money, if it went directly to them, instead of to the mass media distribution machine. Heck, even iTunes is hugely popular, even though (IIRC) the artist only gets 6-8 cents for every dollar that you spend for a song. Imagine if the songs cost only 20 cents, but the artist got 18-19 cents, with a small commission for the site handling the transaction. Without the need for marketing, physical production of media, and the payment of suits, this is completely possible today. Under this model few artists would get hugely rich, but many would be able to make a fair sum of money doing something that they love and enjoy.
That would also make it more likely to have at least some third parties represented in the national government. Combine your suggestion with a neutral districting schema (i.e. don't leave it up to legislators to draw up the districts), and I'd support it.
As for "promoting irresponsibility", when SSA was created, there were a whole lot of people who were poor without being lazy slackabouts (remember the Great Depression?). There will always be lazy people trying to suck at the public teat, but it's not like SSA payments let you live like a prince, not by any stretch of the imagination.
A lot of well-off people consider taxes to be handouts to lazy cheapskates, but they never draw the connection between poverty and how much they have to spend on gated communities, burglar alarms, and all the other fear-based industries that thrive whenever the national poverty numbers rise.
You'd probably return with a comment suggesting euthenasia or a bullet, but since that isn't going to happen anytime soon in the real world, it makes sense to be preventative to save our tax dollars in the long run.
The other replies to this disagree, but I think this is an absolutely true statement if one examines our current culture today. Everything in media/advertising, etc. encourages people to "live for the moment" and not worry about the long-term. This is particularly true for the young, who tend to live in the "now" more than most. And I agree that our current national record of personal debt would suggest that people in the U.S. would squander their money rather than save for the future, if given the choice.
We all pay the price when old people are destitute, in terms of the drain on public health care and other infrastructure requirements. I agree that people sometimes need to be forced to plan ahead, and would rather spend to see people hover above the poverty line than have to cough up more $ when they fall below it and require all sorts of state intervention to keep them breathing.
I've seen several news pieces on Iraq from various sources (PBS, 60 Minutes), and in most I've seen soldiers riding humvees and/or trucks that had obviously home-made armor plating added. And these were of current/recent (1 month old) events, not last year.
By that logic, European countries, which have a firearms ownership rate that is a tiny fraction of the U.S. rate, should have incredibly high home invasion rates.
I don't think your causal link is defensible in this case.
I don't criticize the autobody guy for fixing my car, but if someone from his shop is driving down my street with a bat bashing in the fenders of every parked car, I'm going to be a bit miffed. Dealing with the consequences of an action and wanting to prevent/amelioriate it beforehand don't have to be mutually exclusive.
I don't know the exact numbers, but this can be proven false rather easily with a hypothetical reply. If, say, USAians produce 100 units of output/citizen, and the rest of the world produces 1 unit/citizen, then the total could be expressed in a forumla as 100*(1/25 of total pop)+1*(24/25 of total pop). If everyone produced at the USA level, the total would be 100*total pop, which would be a significantly higher result than 25*current number.
Now, you may be right (I don't know if the US produces 100 times the output as the world average, though I'm sure they definitely exceed that for much of the developing world), but I just wanted to note that your assumption is faulty.
My solution (in addition to reducing copyright terms back to where they were before all these extensions) would be to make copyright non-transferable. I know this would provide some difficulties for artists who need access to corporate distribution channels, but given the new distribution models that the Internet is already opening up, this would be a better system for the 21st century IMO. And it would leave the ultimate control of content in the hands of those who truly deserve it; i.e. the artists.
Yeah, this is why I'm looking forward more to 2006, when Dragon Age and Neverwinter Nights 2 (handed over to Obsidian, although Bioware's still helping a bit from what I've heard) are slated to be finished. But I play more multiplayer than single player, mostly long-running campaigns with small, established groups of players. Neverwinter Nights is still my primary online game in the RPG genre, and I expect that both of my current campaigns will keep going throughout 2005.
I know some MMORPG's have utilized the DM/GM model but the ratio of players to DMs is much higher, so it's often difficult to get help when you need it.
This is the same reason why I tend to play FPS games on servers that have an admin presence to boot unruly players. I like games that have friendly-fire set to on (forcing you to be careful and work together), but this is almost an invitation to grief unless you have a vigilant admin online. There have been a number of games that were really promising in this genre, but had a tough time because the booting mechanism was so ponderous. I've seen publishers trying to improve this by putting in voting mechanisms for players to boot a PKer, as well as automatic boots for players who rack up too many team kills. These are good steps, but are not yet a substitute for a good admin. One of the best systems I've seen is in Call of Duty, where some servers have a "forgive" system in place where you can do a console command to forgive a player who inadvertently team-kills you. If not forgiven, a player is booted after only a few incidences of team-damage.
The article stated that this was a big challenge for the builder, and that he's tried to account for it by making the lower half of the body heavier than the upper half. Still, it won't be easy to handle the balance aspect. Probably won't be mounting PPCs on it anytime soon. ;)
A good reminder on perspective. I see this all the time in my job as well; while my job isn't official tech support I am constantly helping higher-ranking people (and especially administrators) complete basic computer tasks and functions. I don't have a problem with it (contributes to making me indispensible, IMO), although it is amusing sometimes to be called to a cubicle by a frustrated consultant and fix the situation with a single click or button-press.