A pair of game developers created a "Video Game Development" simulation, a tycoon-style game, but set in the world of videogaming. Players had to bring a "game" to market by acquiring talent, testing it, keeping under budget, and so forth.

But they also themselves released a cracked version of the game to BitTorrent. In this cracked version of the game, the game development studio would actually go bankrupt, inevitably... because all of their games were pirated and they made no money.

Those playing the free game then posted on forums, asking how they could beat the pirates to keep the game company alive.

The developers counted-- about 95% of their players were actually themselves pirating the game.

The experiment's more of a prank than any kind of study because this does seem to be the sort of game that few would buy, thus holding down the number of bona-fide owners.

But it is sort of funny that people who'd stolen the game posted on forums asking how to stop people from stealing their games.

Posted by: Ace at 03:27 PM | Comments (134)
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Yup.

Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to September 11, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded; and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials falsely described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.

“It’s frightening and they’re doing some very despicable threats to people,” she said. “Not ‘We’re going to kill you,’ or not ‘We’re going to prosecute you tomorrow,’ but they’re taking career people and making them well aware that their careers will be over [if they cooperate with congressional investigators].”

If the media was really interested in being the Watchdog of Democracy, they might start looking into a hot little story: The Obama administration's threats against, and retalliation against, and prosecutions of, people who would be considered protected by Whistleblower statutes in any other administration.

But the "watchdogs" have given the foxes free reign in the coop.

Posted by: Ace at 02:24 PM | Comments (300)
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I sort of thought we already were -- albeit ineffectually.

Second look at full-on class warfare?

Posted by: Ace at 01:59 PM | Comments (85)
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I recently read Guy de Maupassant's The Horla, because I was looking for French stuff to read. I read it partly because I'd hear that HP Lovecraft was strongly influenced by it.

Having read it-- boy howdy! Most of the elements of the achetypal Lovecraftian story are all present. There's an average man doubting his sanity, an invisible creature that seems to exist just beyond the physical dimensions, dreams of traveling to stars, strange Goats... there's even a mention of (if I have this right) "backwards fishermen," which seems to contain the seed of the "Innsmouth look."

The big things not present are the Work of Art Which Virally Transmits both Forbidden Knowledge and Madness (taken from American writer R.W. McChamber's The King in Yellow) and the High Academic style of writing Lovecraft used to almost convince you he was talking about real stuff.

The English version of the Horla is here. It's pretty short. I don't know if it's scary or not because it's hard to be scared when you're checking the dictionary every third word (as I had to, reading the French).

In addition, because this is now officially Well-Explored Territory, it doesn't seem to have the freshness it might have had in 1887, and so maybe suffers from the Seinfeld is Unfunny syndrome. (That idea is that wickedly original things wind up being so influential, producing so many variations and offspring, that the original winds up looking unoriginal.)

Bit of a weird thing: de Maupassant actually did feel his sanity slipping from him as he got older (and not even that much older!) -- "Many think that the author himself was insane when he wrote this story."

From the page on Guy de Maupassant himself:

In his later years he developed a constant desire for solitude, an obsession for self-preservation, and a fear of death and crazed paranoia of persecution that came from the syphilis he had contracted in his early days. On January 2, 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat and was committed to the celebrated private asylum of Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris, where he died on July 6, 1893.

He was 43 when he died.

Wikipedia tells me that Horla is probably a combination of hor, "out," and là, "there," so the term may be intended to say The One Out There, a Lovecraftian sort of name.

Oh: Obviously Lovecraft red some Ambrose Bierce stuff, too.

The Peter Lorre Radio Play: Bottom of this page.

Recommended by Rob Crawford and @nykensington.

Posted by: Ace at 01:36 PM | Comments (153)
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Why are former Congressmen present? Who cares what they think? We hardly cared about them when they were empowered to screw up our lives; we certainly don't care now.

And why "Congressional-style"? What the hell does that mean?

Well, what it means is that someone is attempting to invest a silly media event with the signifiers of the Official and the Important to get some press.

Oh, and also, because they're going to film it for a documentary.

And those Congresspeople aren't just showing up out patriotic duty to protect us from alien invaders:

According to the Detroit News, the organization is paying Kilpatrick $20,000 plus expenses for her participation, although the former congresswoman said she has always been interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

The organization paying for this is a group that lobbies for extraterrestrial alien research.

Honestly we're all idiots. You, me, everyone here, should just move to Washington DC and open up a lobbying shop for whatever and I do mean "whatever." All you seem to need is a Post Office Box and you can get the fundraising dollars rolling in.

I've got nothing against listening for ETs, by the way. And of course UFOs are quite real-- in the sense that people really do see strange lights in the sky that no one can quite account for.

But the stunt premise of this gathering suggests they're not going to feature SETI guys talking about their antennas, but about close encounters of the anal kind. And seriously, if they've been buzzing us since the 40s and 50s, why the heck hasn't anyone sent a radio message yet?

Who the heck just starts buzzing a planet before broadcasting a reassuring "Heyyyyy buddy, just swingin' by for a minute, don't freak out..."?

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:55 PM | Comments (238)
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Good evening, Morons and Moronettes. Maetenloch is on hobo-assassination assignment, so I've been given the duty for this evening. Let's begin:

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:00 PM | Comments (749)
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Interesting piece by Richard Fernandez, which I think is a little bit hinky in some of the connections it makes, but still makes some great points.

You can read the short version at Instapundit.

Despite an abundance of suggestive information, the FBI seemed singularly unable to see Tsarnaev as a threat. Part of the reason, according to the Washington Examiner, was that blindness was engineered into the system. The agents were trained not to see it.

It is quite possible, though, the FBI agents who interviewed Tsarnaev on both occasions failed to understand what they saw and heard because thatÂ’s what they were trained to do. As The Washington ExaminerÂ’s Mark Flatten reported last year, FBI training manuals were systematically purged in 2011 of all references to Islam that were judged offensive by a specially created five-member panel. Three of the panel members were Muslim advocates from outside the FBI, which still refuses to make public their identities. Nearly 900 pages were removed from the manuals as a result of that review. Several congressmen were allowed to review the removed materials in 2012, on condition that they not disclose what they read to their staffs, the media, or the general public.

...

But to really learn you have to be prepared to listen to what you donÂ’t want to hear. The future only contains new information if it tells you something you donÂ’t know. But bureaucracies want to make all new knowledge predictable, consistent with the existing narrative. And homogenization destroys information.

I'll direct you to the article itself to read about his likening of the preordained conclusions of corporate-like institutions, where conclusions are foreordained and all "truth" must be reached by focus-group analysis and a consensus of various heads of department, to a two-headed coin. A coin where every flip yields "heads" as a result. Making it useless as far as resolving issues.

He continues:

...

What creates sameness is ideology. Ideology by definition reduces the range of responses to situations and limits the ways in which we can decode and encode messages to politically correct outcomes.

The model eventually becomes robust enough to reject information that doesn't fit the model, and ultimately there is no new information, just further reiterations of the model's one permitted outcome.

There's more there, including some kind of computer program which actually seems to be artificially intelligent, or at least possessing one of the central (if not the central) element of true intelligence, self-motivation, self-assignment of personally-chosen goals.

I think there's a lot of stuff here to chew over.

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (209)
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I think the Science (TM) on this is pretty sound.

The resolution, from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and a dozen other Democrats, says the results of climate change include drought and reduced agricultural output. It says these changes can be particularly harmful for women.

"[F]ood insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health," it says.

I know I haven't pointed this out in at least 24 hours but has anyone besides me noticed that Stupid is being embraced as a religion?

Via ‏@charlescwcooke

Posted by: Ace at 10:54 AM | Comments (338)
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The US government does not want a border fence built; the political class does not want a border fence built; the media class, virtually indistinguishable from the political class, does not want a border fence built.

On the other hand, 75% of the public does want a border fence built.

Obviously, the political/media class wins, as usual.

Even if a law required building a fence -- set specific requirements of how many feet of fencing must be constructed per month -- the government would not build it. They would spend endless hours pretending to "plan" the fence or study it for environmental impacts.

So that's what they'd do if the law says that a fence has to be built.

What will they do if the law doesn't even require a fence, but only the development of a "Fencing Strategy"?

Bear in mind, "no fence at all" is a perfectly allowable option in the range of possible "Fencing strategies" one might develop.

The whole thing is a con to deliver amnesty but convince people it's not amnesty.

And as many have said, the public would be willing to entertain the possibility of a mass-amnesty contingent on real border enforcement, including a fence.

But the amnestias simply refuse that. They are committed to the same position they've always held, Amnesty Forever and Amnesty Only.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (226)
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Hatred, the "us vs. them" mentality, fear-mongering, injecting populist thumb-in-the-eye emotionalism into what should be, ideally, reasoned discussion....

Welcome to the Democrats' fundraising offices.

Despite the Democrats’ references to “smears” and “truth,” there is, as always, no reference to any actual issue, and zero factual content. The appeal is strictly us against them, and the emotion that drives Democrats to contribute, and to vote, is hate.

...

It is not in the cards for Republicans to become as mean-spirited as Democrats, but it is essential, I think, for Republicans to understand the game the Democrats are playing and realize that the endless flow of hate spewed out by the Democratic Party poisons the publicÂ’s perception of all of the good Republicans try to do in Washington and around the country.

Posted by: Ace at 09:44 AM | Comments (172)
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