The difference between people like George Washington and Terry Childs is that Washington was representing hundreds of thousands of people whose support he enjoyed to at least a small extent. Childs was representing himself and doesn't have any support.
It doesn't matter. He messed with the man. That is where he messed up. Legal or not he will eventually get his day in court and if he hasn't done anything illegal he will be exonerated. He will never get the last fourteen plus months of his life back. He will never have not gone to jail. The point I was trying to make is that if someone wants to make a point and mess with the government, they need to be ready to deal with how ugly it will get. That's the unfortunate reality of the country that we live in.
That is true. That is why people often times end up spending a lot of time in jail. In Childs' case he is getting a raw deal. He should be out on bail while his attorneys work on defending him.
They were treated that way because Mitnick and in this case Childs didn't learn from the down falls of others. I was into messing with phone systems, cellular systems and other "key infrastructure" type systems in the early 1990s. At that point in time I was in my early teens and pretty much immune from prosecution for my actions. I also had the benefit of the fact that very few people knew anything about networked systems and laws like DCMA and the like weren't on the books. When I turned 18 I took a look around me and I realized this very key thing. The "powers that be" made a conscious decision to spend their efforts prosecuting people who exploit obvious and "easy to secure" holes in systems. I had access to 5ESS switches not because I was an uber hacker, but because the admins were lazy and never changed default passwords and/or failed to shred trash. Rather than spending the effort to educate/train competent admins and put an emphasis on securing systems, they decided to take the approach of severely punishing anyone who messed with the systems. In my case, the approach worked. Free phone calls and root accounts on systems weren't worth trading for jail time in Federal prison.
Terry Childs seems to have made the mistake that a lot of socially inept people make. They tend to believe that their knowledge will insulate them from the brute force of the establishment. Childs apparently felt that he was doing the right thing and wasn't able to distance himself from his own beliefs long enough to recognize that they were putting him in jeopardy. The way he has been treated is absolutely reprehensible. What it isn't is unpredictable. A person who stands in the way of the government should either be ready to start a full on insurrection, or be prepared to be cast aside. The government doesn't do what is "right". They do what needs to be done to maintain order.
The legal system requires that a person have a trial within ten days of being arrested. Often times during the process, they waive that right. Terry Childs has only himself and his lawyer to blame for still being in jail after fourteen months. He could have had his trial and been sentenced by now.
I do the same thing. I park at a train station and ride the train into work. After having my window smashed out I just leave the doors unlocked now. I drive a 1992 Volvo. If they want to steal that hooptie (and can actually get it to start) then more power to them.
Just for shits and giggles I fired up IE8 on this box. Up there in the upper right hand corner next to the search box there is a magnifying glass with a down arrow next to it. Clicking on the down arrow brings up a... hold on... wait for it... LIST OF SEARCH PROVIDERS! Bing isn't even on the fucking list. Google, Yahoo and MSN search are the first three choices. If you don't want those choices, you can select Find More Providers... and you have two pages of providers to search from.
If you're going to whine and gripe about things, at least gripe about things that really are a problem. Although I guess if you're a Lycos user, the fact that Lycos isn't one of the first three providers probably proves beyond a doubt that Microsoft hates Lycos and deserves to burn in hell.
So Google ends up on the list, and Yahoo starts to cry. Yahoo gets added to the list and Altavista starts to cry. Altavista gets added to the list and YourMomSearch starts to cry. Where does it stop? Why does Microsoft have to keep tabs on the rest of the computer industry and make sure that they are included on their lists? This arguments are so ridiculous.
If YOU personally really care about your default search provider, Microsoft has a simple application that will give you a laundry list of providers to choose from. If you really do care enough and know enough about being able to change your search provider, a five step process isn't going to prevent you from doing things.
I'm waiting for someone to suggest something along the lines of: "Microsoft needs to introduce a Clippy like icon the first time IE runs. It should run a five minute instructional video on the history of web search going back to Gopher so that users can make informed decisions about why not select Bing as the default provider."
It's a lose lose situation for Microsoft. Either they treat their users like complete idiots and get ragged on for being stupid. Or they assume that their users know what the fuck they are doing (and can handle a simple process to pick a new search provider) and they get ragged on for not being friendly enough with their competitors. Jesus Christ people! When you run IE you can't even browse the web for the first time without having to answer the question about whether you want to keep your default search provider, or pick a new one. How much more in your face can they make it, short of forcing you to watch Clippy tell you about the web since Gopher and making you take a five question test at the end?!
Well put. Effort wasted on whining is effort wasted on whining. That effort can be better spent working on alternatives. I prefer the platform agnostic approach personally. The designers can have their Mac OSX boxes and run their Adobe products in their favorite environment. The people who really want to write code and deal with the OS at the lowest levels can have fun with the *nix machines. Everyone else can remain stuck with Windows until their critical applications are either ported or replaced by OSS alternatives.
It seems like yet another reason, to create yet another bureaucracy, to collect yet more fees from people for doing the same things that they do every day.
I should just ignore you and let the mods put your post down where it belongs, but you missed the obvious. When a DCMA take down notice is issued, it is customary (and some have even suggested legally required) to inform the person whose work has been taken down why it was taken down. They have to be told who issued the request and on what grounds the request was issued. Just because the artist "was told his images were removed due to copyright concerns" isn't enough. Whose copyright was being violated? The Times claims it wasn't theirs (and they owned the copyright on the original photo). DC Comics claims it wasn't them and they own the copyright on the Joker.
I like the gibbet idea, but I've always been partial to pikes myself. Not only are polearms bad ass in and of themselves, they make great places to put the heads of the conquered or others who need to be made examples of.
I haven't watched television in years and I spend a good 10-15 hours a week training martial arts. Life is too precious to let it rot away in a sedentary existance.
I was born in New York and have a 081- SSN. I think it's time to take out a bunch of Federal loans and blame some lazy Micronesian for failing to repay them. Then I can take the loan money and buy kilos of cocaine^Hdollar bills with the money, resell the dollars and really make some good cash.
1. Be born in the North Eastern United States 2. Take out loan 3. Exploit confused system that can't separate foreigners from natural citizens 4. ??? 5. Profit!
-you- might have not gotten a virus, but I'm sure I'm safe to say that you know a heck of a lot more about computers than the average employee using a computer. Most of them just need a "click here and run the program to see a cute kitten" and they will install a trojan willingly.
I think it's time to put this one to rest. In any sort of corporate environment where "employees" are using computers, there should be multiple layers of defense to eat the 'click here to see the kitten' program before it makes it to the desktop. Between anti-virus on the email server, content filters and the like on the perimeter and anti-virus on the desktop, it should be next to impossible for an employee to get a virus.
I'll be the first to admit that having to have those various levels of security is pretty insane, but it is what it is. Where I work we use Websense to filter malicious content from the web. We route our email through Postini (Google) first and then scan it on the Exchange server before it gets delivered to the users' mailboxes. Then we're running AV on the desktop and Firefox as the default browser (with AdBlock) to pick up whatever Websense doesn't filter. It sucks to have to run the network that way, but it has kept infections down to zero so far this year. One of the pluses is that the users are starting to run Firefox at home because they appreciate the lack of ads at work.
Basically our lifestyle really only works for people 18-30, but after that we fall apart.
You bring up an interesting point here. I find that the older I get (I just turned 31 this year), I find that I feel more disconnected from the main stream, media driven segment of society. It seems to me that the media has been polished to push an image of what people are supposed to grow up into. They provide a pre-packaged reality that serves as a tool to guide people in a certain direction. The message seems to be focused on growing up and moving into accepted societal roles. There aren't many guidelines for what to do after a person reaches those goals.
On the risk of going further off on a tangent here, there are what I consider to be "professional" shows that showcase a profession. (Doctor shows, cop shows, etc). More recently there are now "reality" shows that seem to reassure people of the fact that "it's okay to be a complete jackass". Outside of those two broad segments of television programming, there are offerings on the History channel, or Discovery. Once you look beneath the surface they are revealed to be little more than tales about how to act in society, or how to not act.
Once a person matures beyond the aim of the media machine telling them how to fit in and giving them guidance about what to do, life can become a pretty lonely place. I've struggled with my own depression and like some other posters have said, I found an outlet in philosophy and activity. In my case, traditional Chinese martial arts training has served as a fantastic foundation from which to deal with the uncertainties of life. There certainly are paths through life that will bring about happiness and satisfaction. Those paths do not seem to be readily available in main stream American discourse though.
Some of us would be happy if one company would give us a central repository that we could manage for our own networks. Software whitelisting isn't exactly a new concept.
I think the underlying issue has come from the fact that people have been more focused on making computers do what they want them to do, and not focused on making them do it securely. It's great to sit on the sidelines and talk about how it should have been done better/smarter/more securely in the first place. That perspective does not take into account the reality that computers are relatively new and new functionality comes out almost every day. To consider another aspect of security, we've been living in buildings for over two thousand years and we're still finding ways to make buildings more secure, and dealing with robberies and other similar breaches of security. If, as a species we haven't perfected securing our living spaces in over two millenia, how can we expect ourselves to secure our computer systems in the space of a couple of decades?
It seems to me that the real intent of the regulations involves protecting CBS' rights to broadcast and distribute 'the game'. I doubt that they care about Joe Random Hipster with his iPhone posting pictures of himself and his drunk friends on Facebook. What they're probably concerned about is the guy sitting there with his laptop and webcam giving play to play over a live feed. To look at it another way, CBS isn't there to put some random guy and his friends on Facebook. Conversely, some random guy shouldn't be there trying to compete with CBS or other 'professional' sports reporters who are covering the event. If some random guy wants to drive hits to his site and do so by covering (semi)professional sporting events, then that random guy should pay the same access fees as everyone else.
Step 3 is what irks me the most and as far as I'm concerned, step 3 is all the proof that we need that the financial industry does not care about protecting our personal data. If they truly cared about credit fraud they will give us free credit reports and free identity theft prevention services. They would do so because doing so would be more cost efficient than dealing with the fraud.
The reality seems to be that they will charge us to protect us and just continue to ignore the fraud. I will never pay for any sort of identity theft protection and I think it's criminal that the financial institutions can offer it as a service. Having to pay your bank extra to "really" safe guard the money that you trust to them is kind of like having to pay the conductor on the train an extra fee to actually stop at the stations. At my bank I already pay service fees. I pay fees for my checking account. I pay over draft fees every once in a while. The bank is already making enough that they don't need to charge an extra fee to provide the service that they are supposedly in the business of providing (safe guarding my money).
The original Command and Conquer had different sides with different play styles. NOD and GDI had a fairly large variation on their unit types. The few that come to mind were the GDI helicopter were better at killing vehicles and the NOD helicopters were good against tanks. GDI heavy tanks while NOD had stealth tanks. NOD had those laser beam defense towers while GDI had a more generic gun platform like tower. If you compare that to the original Warcraft, I think you'll find more similarities between sides in WC than in C&C.
On a some what related tangent, the next time you get a bunch of $100 bills, take a look at them and see if you notice any small images that have been stamped onto them. Lowl level coke dealers are notorious for marking their money. A lot of them have their own unique stamps that they use. It would be interesting to do a study to see if there is a higher percentage of contamination on bills that have been stamped, versus those that haven't.
I grew up playing roleplaying games, and also playing computer games. I always enjoyed the simulator games and liked the idea of being able to explore different worlds. My friends and I always wanted games that were more interactive. We wanted 'real life' like environments to interact with. For me, Syndicate was a huge leap in the right direction. That was one of the first games I remember where you could destroy the environment. The zones themselves were limited size, but the game itself didn't limit your actions inside the zone.
APB looks like it could be the game changer in the MMO world. I've been looking forward to it ever since I first heard about it a couple of years ago. It promises to deliver a fully persistent world. When playing the GTA games, I always dread the end of the game because that means the game is over. Once the story ends, you're left with this great interactive game world but nothing to do. APB seems to be aiming to fix that. I hope that they succeed. There is so much potential. The article mentions that the players are the center of the game, and their interactions define the game. I'd hope that there are also NPC aspects of it. For example, a criminal might want a politican killed. In that case, when the criminal players take that mission, cop players could be notified that a contract has been placed on the politican. They could then decide whether or not to take up the task of protecting the politican. Like wise the opposite could happen, where an NPC criminal could have an arrest warrant put out for him and then criminals could decide whether or not to help him fend off the cop players that would be showing up.
People have mentioned griefing and trolls, but the article specifically mentions that on most servers people won't be able to engage each other in combat until some conditions are met. Criminals have to commit crimes before the cops can arrest them. The article wasn't too clear on criminal versus criminal action. From reading the responses to the questions posed by the interviewer, it seems like the devs are aware of the troll/griefer factor and have different game mechanics for different servers. There will be free for all, death match type servers for players who want that. And then there will also be servers focused toward the cops/criminal game play mechanics.
I wonder how the developers will balance the population between realms. The game seems to be focused around creating groups. Given the persistence of the world, it seems like people will want to log onto servers where their friends are and take part in established groups. With a limit of 100 people per server, it seems like if the game gets popular then players will be dealing with server full messages a lot. I wonder how the developers will encourage people to go play on another server, rather than repeatedly trying to get into the ones that all of their friends have been connected to for the last hour or two.
I'd like to see this game succeed. I'm not sure that there are enough players who are interested in the GTA / FPS style of game play. The demographic would seem to be the 12-25 male audience for the most part. That is a very fickle demographic and often inclined to move from one great new thing to the next. It will be interesting to see if the character customization and persistence aspects of the game can keep the players engaged. I hope that they have some mechanics like GTA San Andreas used for weapons. The more you used a weapon, the better your aim got. Little things like that could go a long way toward encouraging people to spend more time with the game. It would also be good to see some sort of low level trade skills, like weaponsmiths making more accurate weapons, or armorers making better body armor, or technical types making better car theft tools.
The game play mechanics are different. I only played Eve for a short period of time, but the environment seemed pretty simple. Everyone is out in space. In that environment there isn't much processing power required to generate... nothing. Space is nothing. It is just a vast open nothingness. When all the server and client machines have to account for are other players it is easier to scale up to hundreds upon hundreds of players.
APB seems to be more like GTA on a massive scale. It takes place in a city. There are vehicles, and pedestrians and many aspects of a persistent world. Did you take a look at the screen shots? Those graphics are gorgeous. The APB world is a city. You have to expect a trade off. There are only so many processing cycles to go around, and a lot of those are being chewed up by generating the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between people like George Washington and Terry Childs is that Washington was representing hundreds of thousands of people whose support he enjoyed to at least a small extent. Childs was representing himself and doesn't have any support.
It doesn't matter. He messed with the man. That is where he messed up. Legal or not he will eventually get his day in court and if he hasn't done anything illegal he will be exonerated. He will never get the last fourteen plus months of his life back. He will never have not gone to jail. The point I was trying to make is that if someone wants to make a point and mess with the government, they need to be ready to deal with how ugly it will get. That's the unfortunate reality of the country that we live in.
That is true. That is why people often times end up spending a lot of time in jail. In Childs' case he is getting a raw deal. He should be out on bail while his attorneys work on defending him.
They were treated that way because Mitnick and in this case Childs didn't learn from the down falls of others. I was into messing with phone systems, cellular systems and other "key infrastructure" type systems in the early 1990s. At that point in time I was in my early teens and pretty much immune from prosecution for my actions. I also had the benefit of the fact that very few people knew anything about networked systems and laws like DCMA and the like weren't on the books. When I turned 18 I took a look around me and I realized this very key thing. The "powers that be" made a conscious decision to spend their efforts prosecuting people who exploit obvious and "easy to secure" holes in systems. I had access to 5ESS switches not because I was an uber hacker, but because the admins were lazy and never changed default passwords and/or failed to shred trash. Rather than spending the effort to educate/train competent admins and put an emphasis on securing systems, they decided to take the approach of severely punishing anyone who messed with the systems. In my case, the approach worked. Free phone calls and root accounts on systems weren't worth trading for jail time in Federal prison.
Terry Childs seems to have made the mistake that a lot of socially inept people make. They tend to believe that their knowledge will insulate them from the brute force of the establishment. Childs apparently felt that he was doing the right thing and wasn't able to distance himself from his own beliefs long enough to recognize that they were putting him in jeopardy. The way he has been treated is absolutely reprehensible. What it isn't is unpredictable. A person who stands in the way of the government should either be ready to start a full on insurrection, or be prepared to be cast aside. The government doesn't do what is "right". They do what needs to be done to maintain order.
The legal system requires that a person have a trial within ten days of being arrested. Often times during the process, they waive that right. Terry Childs has only himself and his lawyer to blame for still being in jail after fourteen months. He could have had his trial and been sentenced by now.
I do the same thing. I park at a train station and ride the train into work. After having my window smashed out I just leave the doors unlocked now. I drive a 1992 Volvo. If they want to steal that hooptie (and can actually get it to start) then more power to them.
Just for shits and giggles I fired up IE8 on this box. Up there in the upper right hand corner next to the search box there is a magnifying glass with a down arrow next to it. Clicking on the down arrow brings up a... hold on... wait for it... LIST OF SEARCH PROVIDERS! Bing isn't even on the fucking list. Google, Yahoo and MSN search are the first three choices. If you don't want those choices, you can select Find More Providers... and you have two pages of providers to search from.
If you're going to whine and gripe about things, at least gripe about things that really are a problem. Although I guess if you're a Lycos user, the fact that Lycos isn't one of the first three providers probably proves beyond a doubt that Microsoft hates Lycos and deserves to burn in hell.
So Google ends up on the list, and Yahoo starts to cry. Yahoo gets added to the list and Altavista starts to cry. Altavista gets added to the list and YourMomSearch starts to cry. Where does it stop? Why does Microsoft have to keep tabs on the rest of the computer industry and make sure that they are included on their lists? This arguments are so ridiculous.
If YOU personally really care about your default search provider, Microsoft has a simple application that will give you a laundry list of providers to choose from. If you really do care enough and know enough about being able to change your search provider, a five step process isn't going to prevent you from doing things.
I'm waiting for someone to suggest something along the lines of: "Microsoft needs to introduce a Clippy like icon the first time IE runs. It should run a five minute instructional video on the history of web search going back to Gopher so that users can make informed decisions about why not select Bing as the default provider."
It's a lose lose situation for Microsoft. Either they treat their users like complete idiots and get ragged on for being stupid. Or they assume that their users know what the fuck they are doing (and can handle a simple process to pick a new search provider) and they get ragged on for not being friendly enough with their competitors. Jesus Christ people! When you run IE you can't even browse the web for the first time without having to answer the question about whether you want to keep your default search provider, or pick a new one. How much more in your face can they make it, short of forcing you to watch Clippy tell you about the web since Gopher and making you take a five question test at the end?!
Well put. Effort wasted on whining is effort wasted on whining. That effort can be better spent working on alternatives. I prefer the platform agnostic approach personally. The designers can have their Mac OSX boxes and run their Adobe products in their favorite environment. The people who really want to write code and deal with the OS at the lowest levels can have fun with the *nix machines. Everyone else can remain stuck with Windows until their critical applications are either ported or replaced by OSS alternatives.
It seems like yet another reason, to create yet another bureaucracy, to collect yet more fees from people for doing the same things that they do every day.
So in the case of Flickr and the Joker image they aren't too concerned about liability from the artist because he does not have the means to sue them.
I should just ignore you and let the mods put your post down where it belongs, but you missed the obvious. When a DCMA take down notice is issued, it is customary (and some have even suggested legally required) to inform the person whose work has been taken down why it was taken down. They have to be told who issued the request and on what grounds the request was issued. Just because the artist "was told his images were removed due to copyright concerns" isn't enough. Whose copyright was being violated? The Times claims it wasn't theirs (and they owned the copyright on the original photo). DC Comics claims it wasn't them and they own the copyright on the Joker.
I like the gibbet idea, but I've always been partial to pikes myself. Not only are polearms bad ass in and of themselves, they make great places to put the heads of the conquered or others who need to be made examples of.
I haven't watched television in years and I spend a good 10-15 hours a week training martial arts. Life is too precious to let it rot away in a sedentary existance.
I was born in New York and have a 081- SSN. I think it's time to take out a bunch of Federal loans and blame some lazy Micronesian for failing to repay them. Then I can take the loan money and buy kilos of cocaine^Hdollar bills with the money, resell the dollars and really make some good cash.
1. Be born in the North Eastern United States
2. Take out loan
3. Exploit confused system that can't separate foreigners from natural citizens
4. ???
5. Profit!
I think it's time to put this one to rest. In any sort of corporate environment where "employees" are using computers, there should be multiple layers of defense to eat the 'click here to see the kitten' program before it makes it to the desktop. Between anti-virus on the email server, content filters and the like on the perimeter and anti-virus on the desktop, it should be next to impossible for an employee to get a virus.
I'll be the first to admit that having to have those various levels of security is pretty insane, but it is what it is. Where I work we use Websense to filter malicious content from the web. We route our email through Postini (Google) first and then scan it on the Exchange server before it gets delivered to the users' mailboxes. Then we're running AV on the desktop and Firefox as the default browser (with AdBlock) to pick up whatever Websense doesn't filter. It sucks to have to run the network that way, but it has kept infections down to zero so far this year. One of the pluses is that the users are starting to run Firefox at home because they appreciate the lack of ads at work.
Basically our lifestyle really only works for people 18-30, but after that we fall apart.
You bring up an interesting point here. I find that the older I get (I just turned 31 this year), I find that I feel more disconnected from the main stream, media driven segment of society. It seems to me that the media has been polished to push an image of what people are supposed to grow up into. They provide a pre-packaged reality that serves as a tool to guide people in a certain direction. The message seems to be focused on growing up and moving into accepted societal roles. There aren't many guidelines for what to do after a person reaches those goals.
On the risk of going further off on a tangent here, there are what I consider to be "professional" shows that showcase a profession. (Doctor shows, cop shows, etc). More recently there are now "reality" shows that seem to reassure people of the fact that "it's okay to be a complete jackass". Outside of those two broad segments of television programming, there are offerings on the History channel, or Discovery. Once you look beneath the surface they are revealed to be little more than tales about how to act in society, or how to not act.
Once a person matures beyond the aim of the media machine telling them how to fit in and giving them guidance about what to do, life can become a pretty lonely place. I've struggled with my own depression and like some other posters have said, I found an outlet in philosophy and activity. In my case, traditional Chinese martial arts training has served as a fantastic foundation from which to deal with the uncertainties of life. There certainly are paths through life that will bring about happiness and satisfaction. Those paths do not seem to be readily available in main stream American discourse though.
Some of us would be happy if one company would give us a central repository that we could manage for our own networks. Software whitelisting isn't exactly a new concept.
I think the underlying issue has come from the fact that people have been more focused on making computers do what they want them to do, and not focused on making them do it securely. It's great to sit on the sidelines and talk about how it should have been done better/smarter/more securely in the first place. That perspective does not take into account the reality that computers are relatively new and new functionality comes out almost every day. To consider another aspect of security, we've been living in buildings for over two thousand years and we're still finding ways to make buildings more secure, and dealing with robberies and other similar breaches of security. If, as a species we haven't perfected securing our living spaces in over two millenia, how can we expect ourselves to secure our computer systems in the space of a couple of decades?
It seems to me that the real intent of the regulations involves protecting CBS' rights to broadcast and distribute 'the game'. I doubt that they care about Joe Random Hipster with his iPhone posting pictures of himself and his drunk friends on Facebook. What they're probably concerned about is the guy sitting there with his laptop and webcam giving play to play over a live feed. To look at it another way, CBS isn't there to put some random guy and his friends on Facebook. Conversely, some random guy shouldn't be there trying to compete with CBS or other 'professional' sports reporters who are covering the event. If some random guy wants to drive hits to his site and do so by covering (semi)professional sporting events, then that random guy should pay the same access fees as everyone else.
Step 3 is what irks me the most and as far as I'm concerned, step 3 is all the proof that we need that the financial industry does not care about protecting our personal data. If they truly cared about credit fraud they will give us free credit reports and free identity theft prevention services. They would do so because doing so would be more cost efficient than dealing with the fraud.
The reality seems to be that they will charge us to protect us and just continue to ignore the fraud. I will never pay for any sort of identity theft protection and I think it's criminal that the financial institutions can offer it as a service. Having to pay your bank extra to "really" safe guard the money that you trust to them is kind of like having to pay the conductor on the train an extra fee to actually stop at the stations. At my bank I already pay service fees. I pay fees for my checking account. I pay over draft fees every once in a while. The bank is already making enough that they don't need to charge an extra fee to provide the service that they are supposedly in the business of providing (safe guarding my money).
The original Command and Conquer had different sides with different play styles. NOD and GDI had a fairly large variation on their unit types. The few that come to mind were the GDI helicopter were better at killing vehicles and the NOD helicopters were good against tanks. GDI heavy tanks while NOD had stealth tanks. NOD had those laser beam defense towers while GDI had a more generic gun platform like tower. If you compare that to the original Warcraft, I think you'll find more similarities between sides in WC than in C&C.
On a some what related tangent, the next time you get a bunch of $100 bills, take a look at them and see if you notice any small images that have been stamped onto them. Lowl level coke dealers are notorious for marking their money. A lot of them have their own unique stamps that they use. It would be interesting to do a study to see if there is a higher percentage of contamination on bills that have been stamped, versus those that haven't.
I grew up playing roleplaying games, and also playing computer games. I always enjoyed the simulator games and liked the idea of being able to explore different worlds. My friends and I always wanted games that were more interactive. We wanted 'real life' like environments to interact with. For me, Syndicate was a huge leap in the right direction. That was one of the first games I remember where you could destroy the environment. The zones themselves were limited size, but the game itself didn't limit your actions inside the zone.
APB looks like it could be the game changer in the MMO world. I've been looking forward to it ever since I first heard about it a couple of years ago. It promises to deliver a fully persistent world. When playing the GTA games, I always dread the end of the game because that means the game is over. Once the story ends, you're left with this great interactive game world but nothing to do. APB seems to be aiming to fix that. I hope that they succeed. There is so much potential. The article mentions that the players are the center of the game, and their interactions define the game. I'd hope that there are also NPC aspects of it. For example, a criminal might want a politican killed. In that case, when the criminal players take that mission, cop players could be notified that a contract has been placed on the politican. They could then decide whether or not to take up the task of protecting the politican. Like wise the opposite could happen, where an NPC criminal could have an arrest warrant put out for him and then criminals could decide whether or not to help him fend off the cop players that would be showing up.
People have mentioned griefing and trolls, but the article specifically mentions that on most servers people won't be able to engage each other in combat until some conditions are met. Criminals have to commit crimes before the cops can arrest them. The article wasn't too clear on criminal versus criminal action. From reading the responses to the questions posed by the interviewer, it seems like the devs are aware of the troll/griefer factor and have different game mechanics for different servers. There will be free for all, death match type servers for players who want that. And then there will also be servers focused toward the cops/criminal game play mechanics.
I wonder how the developers will balance the population between realms. The game seems to be focused around creating groups. Given the persistence of the world, it seems like people will want to log onto servers where their friends are and take part in established groups. With a limit of 100 people per server, it seems like if the game gets popular then players will be dealing with server full messages a lot. I wonder how the developers will encourage people to go play on another server, rather than repeatedly trying to get into the ones that all of their friends have been connected to for the last hour or two.
I'd like to see this game succeed. I'm not sure that there are enough players who are interested in the GTA / FPS style of game play. The demographic would seem to be the 12-25 male audience for the most part. That is a very fickle demographic and often inclined to move from one great new thing to the next. It will be interesting to see if the character customization and persistence aspects of the game can keep the players engaged. I hope that they have some mechanics like GTA San Andreas used for weapons. The more you used a weapon, the better your aim got. Little things like that could go a long way toward encouraging people to spend more time with the game. It would also be good to see some sort of low level trade skills, like weaponsmiths making more accurate weapons, or armorers making better body armor, or technical types making better car theft tools.
The game play mechanics are different. I only played Eve for a short period of time, but the environment seemed pretty simple. Everyone is out in space. In that environment there isn't much processing power required to generate... nothing. Space is nothing. It is just a vast open nothingness. When all the server and client machines have to account for are other players it is easier to scale up to hundreds upon hundreds of players.
APB seems to be more like GTA on a massive scale. It takes place in a city. There are vehicles, and pedestrians and many aspects of a persistent world. Did you take a look at the screen shots? Those graphics are gorgeous. The APB world is a city. You have to expect a trade off. There are only so many processing cycles to go around, and a lot of those are being chewed up by generating the environment.