It's far worse than that. Anyone can apply the "Anonymous" moniker to anything, and there can be no way to prove or disprove such a relationship. Because, at the end of the day, "Anonymous" resolves into exactly what it sounds like... anonymity.

Which is not to say that there aren't individuals acting collectively under the name "Anonymous" that could be identified. Merely that you can't identify someone as solely being a member. You need to tie them back to specific actions to give them a 'real' identify, such as posted on a specific forum with a given user name, or participated in a given DDoS from a given IP address.

Which becomes even more confusing when people want to attribute press releases to "Anonymous" which is analogous to saying "someone, somewhere posted this and we don't know who."

I haven't purchased a Microsoft product for over 10 years now due to my own Linux zealotry and open source fanaticism. I'm quick to criticize Microsoft for their villainy over the years, but even I have to admit this prank is pretty funny no matter if Redmond footed the bill.

Certainly, the gaming industry is not immune to the march of 'progress'. But neither is any other. Advertising continues to become more effective as new techniques emerge that allow them to be more targeted and tantalizing. So, too, do games that want to charge you by the month instead of a lump sum up front become better at luring their players back for just one more numerical increase. And there are certainly a host of creepy psychological factors at work, being taken into account when designing new games or television series or grocery store advert.

But I have to take exception with the idea that an MMO is an 'inherently amoral business'. Escapism isn't some new concept created by the video game industry. The entertainment industry has been feeding off society's desire to escape from the banality of reality since the dawn of art. They've just gotten better at it over the years.

More specifically, if you want to point out the large downside in the growth of all this new and compelling entertainment content, is the growing need many people feel for it. Not because the entertainment is getting better... which, to be sure, it is. But because the reality of their lives is getting worse, and they feel powerless to change things. And this change in society has very little to do with the entertainment industry, and more to do with greed in general.

Actually, this was was part of the entire point behind the creation of copyright law. In the US, the 'for a limited' clause was there so that the author could benefit by monetizing a short term monopoly on their work, and then the copyright would expire and it would revert into the public domain.

Of course, this was in the days of hand written scribes and latter of movable type presses. The concept of digital information transmission did not yet exist, nor with it the idea that information could be shared near instantly at a fraction of the cost.

Since then, copyright laws have increased in duration from the original 'Statute of Anne' which provided 14 years, with an additional 14 years of the copyright was renewed. Compared to the current US version which protects from 70 years after the death of the author, or for corporate owned works, 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication.

We've also moved away from the publication of plain text works, to the new age of computer binary code. So even if the copyright on a computer program would expire, there are no provisions that the author need also provide the original source code. So the US copyright on Lineage should expire in 2093 (should no further extensions be added, and NCSoft is South Korean, so foreign copyrights can get even tricker) then we would be freely able to distribute the compiled client code... but without access to the never published source code or server software... well, doubtless 95 year old software would only be of any interest to historians anyways. Who could freely view the copyright code all that wanted, even during the duration of the copyright... just as long as they didn't distribute it amongst themselves for study.

I wouldn't read any conspiracy theory into it. For those interested, read up on the Frank Scully UFO hoax. Here's one of many links: http://deathby1000papercuts.com/2011/04/guy-hottel-fbi-ufo-memo-roswell-proof-not-exactly/

Yes, you can make money in the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy entertainment, and history is fraught with such examples.

And while LOTR and Harry Pottery are notable examples of commercial successes, there are plenty of examples of Sci-Fi failures in the market place. For those looking to invest their money in a profitable adventure, your safer investment is with reality television, as you can generate the greatest amount of market share for the least cost. Fantastical scenes tend to require a significantly higher investment in terms of set design and special effects than your typical Rom/Real/Sit/Com.

Capitalism is not a system designed for making entertainment, it's designed to make money. And so long as entertainment continues to be funded by those who would rather make money than good entertainment, they will continue to happily cater to those market bases that generate the most revenues for the least cost.

If fans of science fiction really want their fix, they will likely need to put together their own content industry where they are willing to spend more and generate less revenue in lieu of getting the quality content they desire.

After posting, I realize I colored my comment with a bias towards the government funding of science, and for that I apologize. For the purposes of the story in question, it doesn't really matter where the funding comes from. Certainly, for government funding, public opinion matters more. Yet, even in private industry venture capitalist/CFOs/PHBs are going to be more inclined to green-light speculative research when they have some common culture on which to bias their decisions. For instance, a handful of notables involved in the rise of wireless communication (such as Martin Cooper, father of the handheld mobile phone) remarked on being influenced by the communicators used in Star Trek.

It's not just about inspiring kids to grow up and become scientists. It's also about how much the next generation will care about investment in a new fancy science fiction future. There are plenty of reason to want to cut government spending. And if you care nothing about space exploration and travel, you could easily see the budget of a government organization like NASA or the National Science Foundation as completely superfluous.

Pure science needs pure funding. If your lab is forced to spend more time worried about how to monetize an idea than to explore it's scientific ramifications, you end up in compromising positions of wanting to cut corners and fudge the numbers.

In my ward, there were a total of 9 positions up for vote. Only three positions had names on the ballot there weren't a Republican or Democrat. Two positions were incumbents running unopposed. So when I went to vote today, I only voted on 5 of the positions. Three independents who made it on the ballot, one was an independent running as a write in, and one was a Democrat that I don't dislike.

I do agree that there are a lot of lousy names on the ballot. In the handful of hours I spent looking up the candidates who would be on the ballot in my district and listening to their public radio interviews, there was only one that I genuinely liked. So mostly I'm just voting on candidates I don't hate. On the plus side, when I first started voting, there was some 300 votes cast for independent candidates. Two years ago, my distract had just under 10% of the votes going to independents.

If you want fair multi-play online, you can't let the participants host their own games. Because then, as you say, the host always knows what everyone is doing. What you need is an intermediate network to host the games, a neutral third party service to keep things fair. Something that never sends any information to the client it doesn't need. Of course, this then requires that the host be trusted by the players to do all the heavy lifting on it's side to validate all the inputs being received. Which, again, as you say, would likely suggest a monthly subscription fee to host such a network.

If you don't do this, and instead trust the network to play wack-a-mole and verify that everyone is running a validated copy of the client binary without any untrusted third party software running, you're going to have cheaters.

"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
http://baetzler.de/humor/meat_beings.html

Snake Plissken? I heard he was dead.

A lot of the idealists are going to give you shit for holding this position. They have their reasons, and some of them might even be good ones, but let's skip that for now. If you're a realist or a pragmatist, their idealism probably isn't going to do much for you. And I get where you're coming from. Here in the US, we have a large number of disenfranchised voters who feel exactly the same way as you. And the Powers That Be really like it that way, since less voters means less work buying elections.

On the plus side, votes do seem to count. If you look at the ridiculous amounts of money being spent in US politics on campaigns, that should be prime evidence of the power of the vote. The problem, of course, is in who holds that power. Voters cast their votes for a great many reasons, and some of those reasons have been fairly easy to subvert.

The cure for this problem is not simple, and it is not easy, and I don't blame you for not wanting to help. A great many good people will likely need to stand up and serve jail time and worse in acts of civil disobedience to try and change things. Getting people to stand up and take notice to what is going on around them, and not just passively tune out discussions of politics and social justice will be a major challenge by itself. Getting people to believe in change, and to believe in a better way of social governance, and actively participate in politics... that does seem pretty impossible. And if that dream were to ever come true, and we did 'fix' things, it would carry with it a good of different problems.

But I have some good news. It only feels like there is nothing you can do about it. The bad news is that there are powerful forces at work trying to make sure you always feel that way. Of course, it has pretty much always been up to you how you want to feel about that, and what you want to do about that. Rather than passively accepting that things suck and committing yourself to the belief that it will never change, even something simple like trying to engage people in discussions on political issues can help. The more minds like yours that we can even open to the possibility of change can only help.

Of course, change is not without risk, and getting your hopes up is a good way to see them dashed to pieces at your feet. But, you already know how it is. This is the real world.