If The Truth Fits

Microsoft matches reward for missing Canadian teen - A 15 year old Canadian boy named Brandon Crisp went missing on October 13th after his parents stopped him from playing on his Xbox 360, someone (it isn’t made clear who) put up a reward of $25,000 (Canadian) for infromation that will hopefully lead to finding Brandon, and Microsoft have offered to match the reward.

I don’t know why so many people hate Microsoft, people are always saying that they’re evil, and yet, I can’t really think of anything evil that they’ve done in the world of computing. Okay, I’ve never used Windows Vista, but how bad can that really be? Some people seem to think that Bill Gates is the devil incarnate, saying that all he wanted was to get money out of them and didn’t care about his products. They seem to forget where Bill comes from, the guy is a geek, I’m sure he would love it if he could push a product out of the door that was 100% perfect, but business and practicality gets in the way. And the money thing? Now that Bill has ’stepped back’ from working at Microsoft and stopped palling around with Jerry Seinfeld he’s dedicating a lot more of his time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, y’know, the foundation he’s using to try and bring about an end to… pretty much all the problems in the world by the looks of it. He’s spending quite a large proportion of his astounding wealth on the Foundation, so I guess that even if you thought he was a money grabber, at least he’s doing some good with it.

Getting back to the story after that extended sidebar, obviously this is a pretty sad story, whenever a kid goes missing you worry, at that age you think you can take on the world but there’s a lot of danger out there and I hope that Brandon gets home safe soon, but at the same time… what kind of kid runs away because his parents stop him from playing on his Xbox? I know that when you’re 15 your mind isn’t all that focused, but I can’t quite follow the logic between these steps: I like playing on my Xbox, Mom and Dad won’t let me play on my Xbox… I’d better run away. Where does this kid expect to go from there with this, but hey, like I said, at that age you aren’t exactly thinking straight, and I’m sure that Brandon thinks he has good reasons.

The Reuters article that I found out about this story worried me somewhat, here’s a quote to help illustrate my point:

It is possible that police will ask or have already asked Microsoft to divulge the list of players with whom Brandon Crisp has played recently.

As online gaming has exploded in popularity since the start of the decade, academics and parents have raised concerns over the possibility of addiction.

Last year, the American Medical Association said more research was necessary on the potential of addiction to video games. It urged parents to closely monitor their children’s use of games and the Internet.

Web sites such as www.wowdetox.com, a sounding board for those addicted to or trying to quit the popular “World of Warcraft” online game, have sprung up as well.

So, the first part of that, about the police asking Microsoft for information, is quite clearly pure speculation, but it is being reported as a fact. The second part is again based upon speculation rather than fact. Parents concerns are not good evidence, and the suggestion of the American Medical Association doesn’t really mean anything either, they say it needs more study, and that parents should monitor their childrens gaming and internet usage, monitor it for what? When was there a suggestion in the story about Brandon Crisp that he was addicted to playing video games? The guy is 15 years old, I’d be willing to be that in a medical sense a pretty high percentage of kids could be classified as being ‘addicted’ to video games, just because a website about people wanting to play less World of Warcraft has been opened doesn’t mean that Brandon was addicted to playing Call of Duty 4.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Reuters should have gotten a staff member that plays on their Xbox to write that story.

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Photo credit: Hermida

A quick apology and explanation about the lack of posts of late. At this very moment I’m typing from a house in the South of France (right next to the sea!) where I’ve been working for the past week, and will be for the next couple of weeks. The work day here from from about 8:30 to 19:00 and its usually pretty physical stuff, so by the end of the day my brain isn’t ‘all there’ if you know what I mean. Also, I haven’t got as much time as usual to be checking out the news to see what’s happening in the world (I have literally no idea how the stock markets are doing), so that’s why you haven’t been getting your daily dose of my opinions recently.

One story that I have seen in a few places is a rather unusual one that concerns property rights. I know, property rights, you know this post is going to be a barrel of fun. Oh, it also concerns murder, ahhh, you’re hooked now aren’t you. Okay, its not actual murder, its virtual murder, but despite the murder being virtual it is having some very real ramifications.

In Japan (of course), a 43 year-old woman who was ‘divorced’ by her online husband in a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game) called Maple Story may face time in jail after logging onto her former “husband’s” account and killing his character. Yes, apparently in Japan doing something like that could result in you going to jail, or getting a rather hefty fine at the very least. I’m sure that if it happened in the UK it either wouldn’t make the news, or would be a laffer on page 9, but the police would probably have better things to do. Not so in Japan, where digital life has very much integrated with ‘real’ life and these matters are taken pretty seriously. In cases like this it isn’t actually the ‘murder’ itself which is the crime, its the woman illegally accessing the man’s account, but that wouldn’t be as interesting of a story now, would it?

Personally, I’m undecided as to whether I can really think about this act as a crime. If I opened an account to play Maple Story, and then someone hacked into it and killed virtual Andy I’d probably be quite annoyed, but I wouldn’t think it was a crime. However, if I had played it for months and months, going around completing quests and making friends, I’d probably be pissed off if one of those people I’d met hacked my account and took their revenge, maybe not to the point of calling the police, but still pretty pissed off. If someone hacked into my e-mail, that would be a crime, if they hacked into my Facebook profile, it would be inconvenietn but probably not a crime, if they hacked into one of my websites, I’d be scared to death of losing many years work, and it probably would be a crime, but I don’t think anything could be done about it so I wouldn’t get the authorities involved.

As you can probably tell from this article, this news story has confused me greatly. I spend a lot of my time working on the internet writing articles, blog postings, and designing websites every so often, so I know exactly what the guy was going through when his character was killed (I’ve lost work in crashes before), and yet I can’t quite bring myself to think that someone should go to jail (or even receive a fine) for a virtual murder.

[That baby put a smile on your face, right?]
Okay, I’m bored of being depressed, just because stocks are slumping at rates not seen since the Great Depression doesn’t mean it should get me down, so this weeks Friday news roundup is going to be upbeat. Obviously, I need to scour the entire damned world to find stories that alleviate the doom-factor that has been pervading the news, my thoughts, my conversations, and what I read on the internet, so you’ve got to trust me when I say that this article took a lot more research than the average article I write.

1. A man that had a double arm transplant is ‘doing well’! A German man called Karl Merk who lost both his arms in a combine harvester accident (I bet that was nasty) spoke this week of his joy after becoming the world’s first ever recipient of a double arm transplant. The operation, which lasted 15-hours and was carried out by “40 surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and other support staff,” was actually carried out in late July, but I guess that when you’re given two new arms (well, technically they were used) it takes a while to get used to them and declare the operation a success. These arms are actual real arms, not the robotic ones that we’ve seen in the past, I can’t decide which I find more impressive, being able to build arms out of metal, wires and servos that can be controlled by a persons mind, or taking the arms off one persons body (presumably deceased), reattaching them to another person and then those arms actually working again, in a fairly limited way at the moment, but still. You know what, one doesn’t need to be better than the other, they’re both pretty awesome.

2. There’s going to be a suicide net on the side of the Golden Gate bridge! Yep, my upbeat news roundup is about to deal with suicide. A plan has been approved to build a suicide net along the sides of the famous bridge in San Fransisco, although it is subject to further review and study before the steel net is installed. Obviously I’m happy that the chances of people dying by flinging themselves off the bridge are going to be diminished, but is a net really the answer? Apparently it will cost $40-$50 million, for that price you could employ people to patrol the bridge 24/7 for many years, trying to help people mentally rather than physically. Also, what’s to stop them jumping off the edge of the net?

3. Damn, that wasn’t particularly upbeat, how about this? I turned 24 yesterday! Sure, it’s not that exciting for you, but it was pretty fun for me!

4. Apparently Sarah Palin is going do by on Saturday Night Live! Whilst I would love it if Tina Fey absolutely ripped her apart for just about everything the Mayor of the meth capital of Alaska believes in, I’m sure this will just turn out to be yet another crappy cameo on SNL.

5. There are sites dedicated to good news! This is the perfect antitode to all the bad stuff that’s going on in the world at the moment. They are often trying to find the silver lining in almost everything though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were to start reporting that the current financial crisis means that its a great time to get into the repossession business.

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Guess what subject I still don’t understand? The economy, stupid! I thought I’d had it all figured out, the bailout bill would pass, the economy would stabilise somewhat, the banks would be more confident and have less fear of lending to each other, and the world wouldn’t be completely doomed and I wouldn’t have to start stockpiling turnips for the winter because my money is worth less/nothing/going to be replaced with Chinese Yuan (please delete as necessary relating to when you read this article). Clearly, that hasn’t happened, as the markets are continuing to tumble like people from Gloucester chasing a wheel of cheese down a hill, which sounds a lot more entertaining than the stock market, but I’m pretty sure that more people are getting hurt on Wall St.

After the Chinese milk scandal, which has seen some 53,000 people people ill and caused the death of four infants (that we know of, who knows what the real number is), the Chinese government has seen fit to issue official limits on the amount of melamine (the chemical which caused all the problems) that can be used in baby formula. I guess this is the second time that I’m accusing the Chinese of closing the gate after the horse has bolted after that mining corruption scandal, but its pretty amazing that its taken them this long to sort out how much, if any, melamine can safely be put in the formula.

Apparently Barack Obama ‘pals around‘ with terrorists. That’s the latest monumentally important debate point raging amongst the media. Not how they’re going to fix the economy, pull out of Iraq, lower crime rates, stop the prison population from continuing to rise, or deal with the myriad of foreign policy situations that the US finds itself embroiled in on a near weekly basis. Oh, and John McCain might be corrupt. It’s getting really hard to see the issues on the road to the election with all this mud being thrown at the windscreen.

Oh, and the debates between Obama and McCain are really, really boring. All they do is go over the talking points, pretend to agree with each other, avoid the questions, act all folksy (okay, not as much as Sarah “Don’t ‘cha know” Palin), and then stand around shaking hands for a while afterwards. It’s boring, where’s the zazz? Where’s the interrogation? Where’s someone calling them out on all the ‘facts’ that keep getting cited that simply aren’t true. There’s a news presenter here in the UK called Jeremy Paxman who is respected by pretty much everyone because he really goes for the jugular. Not because he’s after the fame, just because he doesn’t let them get away with lying to him, I think that CNN, MSNBC or maybe even crazy-old Fox News should have borrowed him from the BBC to try and get some real answers out of politicians for the upcoming election. If you’re wondering who I’m wittering on about, try checking out Paxman on YouTube if you’re in the mood for seeing some politicians getting a well deserved nailing.

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I’ve read about this story a few times on my travels around the web today, and I’ve found that every single one of those stories felt the need to point out that this is NOT an April Fool’s style prank or faux-feature, possibly because Google are so well known for the hoaxes that they spring upon a very skeptical public every April 1st, some of which were pretty obvious (does anyone else remember Google PigeonRank?), and some of which were so crazy that they had an air of plausibility about them (Virgle? It made so much sense!). I’ve always thought that one of these years, Google would pull the old switcheroo and launch a real product on April Fools Day and not get involved in the web’s April 1st shenanigans, since I’m sure it would confuse the hell out of people, which would probably be the funniest thing they’ve done for Fool’s Day for a few years.

Sorry, I’m afraid I went off on a bit of a tangent there, Google announced a new product today which seems to have caught a lot of attention. It is called ‘Mail Goggles‘ and can be enabled in the Settings>Labs tab when you’re using Gmail. The idea behind it is that there are quite a lot of people who after a night out on the sauce might come home and decide that they’d better check their e-mails before they go to bed, just to see if anything really important has come up, but in the process they might decide to tell a few people what they really think of them in a few e-mails that they’ll probablycertainly regret sending in the morning. These people need protecting from themselves in their inebriated state, and that’s where Mail Goggles comes in. Once enabled, it will activate itself at certain times of night and over the whole weekend (Googlers must party hard at weekends!), and before you are allowed to send an e-mail it will ask you to complete a number of fairly simple maths problems (though you can alter the difficulty level) within a time limit. If you complete the problems, your e-mail will be sent, if not, Google will tell you to have a glass of water and go to bed (no, really).

Whilst I’m sure that if I were really determined to send an e-mail telling them that “they should go to hell” then I would make sure that e-mail got there, I might start by simply disabling ‘Mail Goggles’ (duh!), but I do think its a fun little feature, and it might actually be pretty effective. For one thing, I remember coming home (staggering home, some might say) from a night out, and for some reason I decided it would be a good idea to try and play sudoku on my phone (yep, you can even play sudoku on an iPhone, it can do anything!), after staring at the screen for a minute I’m pretty sure I fell asleep, so maybe Google are onto something with this whole numbers angle. Also, I think that if I were to fail at completing the maths problems once then it might set off a few alarm bells in my head that it might be a good idea to re-read that e-mail, maybe they shouldn’t go to hell, just New Jersey?

As Ars Technica comments, it would be really great if someone made something for cellphones on Friday and Saturday nights!

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I totally get where he’s coming from, on a philosophical level I even kind of agree with him (even if in practice I’m far too selfish to actually follow through on the message), but at a certain point I do think that there’s a certain level of hypocrisy going on here.

Pope Benedict XVI has told a meeting of bishops in Rome that “the global financial crisis is proof that the pursuit of money and success is pointless.” Aside from that being astoundingly depressing, it very much feels like a “why bother?” kind of approach to life to me, something about the Pope saying it feels a bit off to me. Yeah, I get the whole wealth angle when it comes to Catholicism, but it just looks odd when the man that’s spreading that message wears even more gold than the whole front-row at the BET Hip Hop Awards.

I’m sure that the argument for him being able to blind the congregation if the light came through the stained-glass windows of the church is that “he’s the freaking Pope” and he can do what he wants, and that I’d probably be just as annoyed if he turned up to mass wearing a pair of slacks and a t-shirt with rib sauce stains on, but I was under the impression that the Pope was meant to try and help people, and if he could help people by selling off some of the bling (I hate that word, by the way, but it seemed to fit with my point) then maybe the it might be a good idea. Also, the man wears Prada shoes, I’m sure he doesn’t pay for them, but his shoe rack could probably buy a house, though that’s not really saying much considering that I could buy a house for less than the cost of a beer (and not even imported beer either).

Why on earth shouldn’t people be striving for success? Seriously, what’s the deal with that? Maybe I’m taking it out of context a bit, but it does seem like a very odd thing to say. All throughout our lives we’re told to try our best and aim for our goals, and then the Pope tells us not to bother? And this little lesson is coming from the Pope, if it were coming from some guy that sleeps in the bus station and wears carrier bags for shoes then maybe I could get where they were coming from, but he’s the Pope. As far as being a Catholic goes, becoming the Pope is pretty much the best you’re going to do, as far as I understand it, you’ve got God, then Jesus, then the Pope. I think you can classify yourself as being a bit of a success if you’ve landed the number one job in the world for your industry (some of us just have to make do with being one of the top t-shirt bloggers in the world). Also, once people start designing cars especially for you, you’ve got to think that you’re kind of a big deal, and that you can tick ’successful’ off the big list of ‘things to do’.

Wouldn’t it be nice if just once you heard a story about the Pope and he actually had something nice to say? Maybe people would be sticking with the Church rather than going down the atheism route is someone told the Pope that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

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It’s getting pretty hard to find a news story that I haven’t already covered here on If The Truth Fits, the news just seems to be a continuing cycle that rolls a bit like this:

A bank/loan company/mortgage lender is in trouble… stock market goes down… stock market goes up… Sarah Palin is ridiculously unqualified for the Vice Presidency… lots of people die in a far away country and it only gets a small mention on TV channels that talk about the news 24 hours a day… and the Chinese have put a substance into something that kids either eat or play with and you can’t fathom why they’ve put it in there.

But, I’ve dug around (that’s called journalism!) and found something totally awesome that might make you forget about my regular theme on this blog that the world is almost certainly screwed, especially if I’m looking towards Lindsay Lohan for political guidance (maybe I’m the only one that’s screwed?). “Florida Man Punches Shark to Save His Dog“. Oh my yes, that story exists and I am a happy man to talk about it. A carpenter from the Florida Keys called Greg LeNoir was taking his rat terrier called Jake for a walk at the beach, and as dogs do, Jake went for a paddle in the water. Greg saw a shark heading straight for Jake and within moments the shark had pulled the 14-pound terrier underwater, Greg tried yelling first but apparently the shark was in no mood to listen, so Greg kicked it up a notch. He dived into the water and starting punching the shark about the head and back until it let go of his dog. Jake sustained some injuries but it is believed that he will make a full recovery. A man fighting a shark to save his dog, can you really think of a better story to sum up the bond that exists between people and their pets? I don’t have any pets so its hard for me to empathise, and I guess it makes it easier for me to think it about it rationally, but don’t you think its amazing the lengths that people are willing to go to for their pets?

Think about it, and I realise that I’m going to sound pretty heartless here, that dog is just an animal, I know dogs tend to be pretty loyal to their owners, but most of them are pretty dumb and would barely be able to tell who their owner was as long as someone took them for a walk every day and put food in front of them. But I think that element actually elevates this story somewhat, there’s no real reason why Mr LeNoir should have put his own life at risk for his pet, if Jake died it would be sad, but he could always get another dog (why, I am heartless), but instead of leaving Jake he put his own life at risk, I just don’t know if I could do that. Actually, I’d imagine that most dog owners in the same position would probably have dived right in and given that shark hell.

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I don’t want to do too many of these ‘news roundup’ style posts because I’d like to focus on just one theme or idea in each post, but I was looking through the news trying to find something positive to kick the week off and failed miserably because it seems like pretty much nothing good has happened anywhere today. Take a look:

1. The biggest news of the day, and its still breaking so by the time I’ve written the rest of the article it will probably be out of date, is that the $700 billion bailout has been rejected by the House. In the aftermath of this the Dow Jones posted its largest ever one-day point decline, 777.68 points, which is a value of about $1.1 trillion dollars. I know that my grasp upon the financial world is pretty weak, but isn’t $1.1 trillion smaller than $700 billion?

2. The extreme-right are on the rise in Austria. They want to allow the Nazi swastika to be shown in public, their leader has called women in traditional Islamic dress “female ninjas,” he wants to take Austria out of the European Union, and its not all that crazy to imagine that he might be the next Austrian chancellor. Two extreme-right parties in Austria, the ‘Freedom Party’, lead by Heinz-Christian Strache (who actually looks quite nice), and the Alliance for the Future of Austria managed to get 29 percent of the vote in a recent general election in Austria. It sickens me that opinions like that still persist in Europe considering how far I thought we’d come, but apparently there is still a significant portion of Austria (and many other countries in Europe, I must admit) that hold such views. Political commentators have suggested that the far-right was aided by a poor turnout and dissatisfaction with the countries traditionally popular parties, but when it comes to politics I don’t think people vote for an extreme party unless they believe at least part of their manifesto, otherwise the risk just seems to great.

3. A 26 year old teacher in Nebraska fled to Mexico with a 13 year old boy so that she could have sex with him have been sent to prison for 6 years. When someone going to prison is the high point of a story you know its going to get you down a bit. I know that cases like this are extremely, extremely rare, but I’m pretty sure that if I had a kid I would have to strap a video camera to their head and have it beam pictures straight to my iPhone (a feature that I presume it will have by the time I have a child) so that I can make sure no one goes near my kid without a thorough vetting procedure before-hand. Sure, little Andy Jr. would be lonely, but they would be safe!

4. Pirates (yes, actual pirates) have seized a Ukrainian freighter that was carrying 33 Soviet-designed tanks, and there are now fears that those tanks may end up in “the wrong hands” in the failed state of Somalia. The pirates are demanding $20 million for the release of the ship, the crew, and its cargo, which seems almost laughable since the ships every move is being flanked by US Navy destroyers, except the American ships can do nothing (though they have now cornered the ship, preventing an escape). The impotence of this situation saddens me, I don’t believe that America should act as the worlds policeman, but why can’t they just, y’know, fix this? I guess the only silver lining on this story is that the cargo was probably destined for Sudan, and the less munitions there in Sudan the better in my opinion.

5. Belarus, a country on the borders of Europe, has just held an election. Take a guess how many seats the opposition party got in Parliament? If you guessed zero, you win a prize (note: prize comes in the form of self-satisfaction and has no monetary value). In case you hadn’t guessed, the chances of that happening in a free country are pretty unlikely, and the election has been widely condemned by the US Government, independent international observers with Belarus, and just about everyone that isn’t Russia, but in spite of all the protestations, what are ‘we’ going to do? Here’s my guess, nothing.

That’s a feeling I’m left with about a lot of these stories; what can we do? Nothing.