Spacelord - Slashdot User

Combat Vets On CoD: Black Ops, Medal of Honor Taliban 93

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday November 23, 2010 @07:51AM from the not-as-messy-as-the-real-deal dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Thom 'SSGTRAN' Tran, seen in the Call of Duty: Black Ops live action trailer and in the game as the NVA multiplayer character, gets interviewed and talks about Medal of Honor's Taliban drama. '... to me, it's a non-issue. This is Hollywood. This is entertainment. There has to be a bad guy if there's going to be a good guy. It's that simple. Regardless of whether you call them — "Taliban" or "Op For" — you're looking at the same thing. They're the bad guys.'" Gamasutra published a related story about military simulation games from the perspective of black ops veteran and awesome-name-contest winner Wolfgang Hammersmith. "In his view, all gunfights are a series of ordered and logical decisions; when he explains it to me, I can sense him performing mental math, brain exercise, the kind that appeals to gamers and game designers. Precise skill, calculated reaction. Combat operations and pistolcraft are the man's life's work."

Comment Re:Failed Prisons? (Score 1) 545

by Spacelord on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @07:24AM (#33433844) Attached to: Building Prisons Without Walls Using GPS Devices

Why are the prisons filled with a good portion of non-violent criminals then? Because "doing harm" can also be non-violent and one could argue that one would want to protect society from non-violent crimes as well. Now of course you could argue about which offenses deserve jailtime and which don't. For instance, I don't believe in jailtime for small drug related offenses. But that's a legislation issue, it doesn't have anything to do with prisons being necessary or not. If the law says that you have go to prison for carrying a bit of weed, then the law is broken not the prison system.

Comment Failed Prisons? (Score 3, Insightful) 545

by Spacelord on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @05:55AM (#33424480) Attached to: Building Prisons Without Walls Using GPS Devices

TFA claims that prisons have failed. I don't entirely agree. The way I see it, prisons have three roles: one is reeducation, when we release someone from prison, they should come out as better citizens, not better criminals. In that respect, you could say that prisons have failed.

The second role of prisons however is punishment: prison SHOULD be an unpleasant experience for someone who has committed a crime. It should be a deterrent, something they will never want to experience again. Also, if you're a victim of a crime, you want to know that the criminal actually gets punished and doesn't get off with just a slap on the wrist.

Finally, the third role of prisons is protecting society, taking dangerous individuals out of the loop for a considerable amount of time so that they can't do any harm.

It seems to me that while GPS tracking devices may help somewhat with role 1, they don't do anything for role 2 and 3. So in my opinion, they shouldn't be a replacement for a prison system, but an addition to it, for instance in combination with the parole system.

Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters 203

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @07:56AM from the be-careful-they-cheat dept.

Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes." Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.

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