It sounds by your reasoning than anyone that sends real junk mail, you know, in an envelope to your door, should be fined much more. If the fine is 100 dollars for an email, I couldn't see the fine for real life junk mail to be any less than $20,000 per piece of junk mail, given the resources it requires for someone to open the envelope (possibly cutting themselves), lifting the paper to your eyes, determining it is useless, and throwing it in the trash or recycling, and then taking that package to the curb. While spam is a nuisance, be realistic. Popups, advertising online, it is just the way of the Internet and people have accepted it. This is a ridiculous fine. All they should legally be able to do is seize every dollar he earned and an extra 10 k for wasting people's time. At least then they might actually collect the money.

To be free you have to be free to commit crime. This idea isn't making it impossible to commit crime, but you are giving up too much in the hopes of finding more criminals, and turning people into being afraid to commit crime so they stop. That seems to be the goal of this, make detection so perfect that criminals know they will get caught. Sounds like DRM, and we know that has worked perfectly. Why not spend money on reducing the incentive for crime rather than battling criminals. The theory of taking away the incentive (make sure people have access to jobs and homes if they want them) is just as sound as the theory all criminals can be found with a DNA database.

I was not guessing. I was stating a fact. But you are right, it would be possible, just not with this title on this server architecture.

Spawning instances on demand would require a complete re-architecture of the servers that are used for these games. Given no one is buying them anymore, it would be hard pressed to convince management to take this on when they have work to do for games that people will actually buy.

MS and Sony do not host the servers, the game company does, and it is up to them to decide to stop hosting them, and as far as I know, all that money goes to MS for xbox live subscription fees, none to the developers. However, Microsoft is very interested if one of the big titles on their platform experiences outages while many people are playing.

I just watched the entire video, and have no problem with what they did. Working in a game company, and any software company really, you learn that there is no substitute for real users. Once you get thousands of users online doing no deterministic things, your architecture crumbles. These guys did whatever they could to fix it, and for that I commend them. Hell, I was tempted to email the CEO and ask for a job until I learned they are in MI. I am very impressed with their efforts and the fact they documented it as evidence for their fans.

It isn't like their brains went back to stone age. They of course possess all the knowledge of the civilization they are leaving behind. They know how to farm, know how to make weapons, know how to make medicine and drugs, and even understand the theory of computers and could eventually build them if they chose. So they are leaving nothing behind but possessions, not the knowledge that made those possessions.

I would imagine people wouldn't think of them as victimless crimes if the people and corporations they were ripping off most of the time were multi-millionaires.

They are of course bringing it out on xbox 360 as well, but not sure how that will work out given the 9 gig max dvd size... Could the game spawn 5 discs...