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This may be off-topic, but illness-avoidance can often be effected by not touching other people. The nerds of PAX (the Penny Arcade expo) now avoid handshakes, and use the "Iron Guard Salute" (basically arms crossed in an X):

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/03/26

Whether it's other people, other people's germs or whatever, as long as you wash your hands proerly before eating you seriously reduce the chances of getting sick.

This may be off-topic, but illness-avoidance can often be effected by not touching other people. The nerds of PAX (the Penny Arcade expo) now avoid handshakes, and use the "Iron Guard Salute" (basically arms crossed in an X):

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/03/26

There was an awesome Extra Credits video exactly about this issue, very worth watching: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/metrics

Take, for instance, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and their Double XP Promotion [pcgamer.com]. This really pisses off real gamers (the ones who play a lot and get better through time and practice), and especially pisses off those who had to work hard for their last prestige.

Sure, but you'll still buy it, mate?

Every time I see Ron Wyden associated with something he's the one asking intelligent questions or proposing reasonable legislation. It's gotten to the point where I have to watch myself to make sure I don't agree with him reflexively.

I'm incredibly impressed with him, and I sure wish *he* would run for president. I'm nauseated at the prospect of choosing between Romney and Obama next year.

Sometimes I even want to do this with pictures of Ron. Secret Love Lair

Oh, and having Googled for that cartoon, I also came across an interesting accompanying article (which explains the strip better as well).

And beta testing...God. You think you're getting paid to play games and it turns out you're getting paid to play *broken* games. And when something breaks you're not supposed to move on or work around it; your job is to break it again and again and again until you can document how, when, and maybe even why it breaks for the developers.

Obligatory Penny Arcade

You sure about that? Don't you know what a rhombus is?

I know a few voice activated commands that are probably missing.

Every time I see one of these mergers this comes to mind.

Well, that and the Looney Tunes cliche of two characters grabbing each other in mid-air before plummeting to the earth below.

Funny enough, Penny Arcade already commented on this... nine years ago.

Pretty much this

they are willing to behave with a computer in a way they (probably) wouldn't in real life

There's an xkcd cartoon about it, but I'm damned if I can find it. I'm such a shitcock sometimes.

Because it was Penny Arcade instead.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

Doesn't matter much to me what his reasons are. I'm just suggesting that if he really wants to pretend it's a bad idea to share this information, he shouldn't have made an offer like that, even rhetorically.

It's a bit like when the Sony CEO offered to pay a bounty for PS3s found on shelves. Be wary of being so confident in your assumptions that you make a promise you can't keep. (Or, relevant but worse.)

Doesn't matter much to me what his reasons are. I'm just suggesting that if he really wants to pretend it's a bad idea to share this information, he shouldn't have made an offer like that, even rhetorically.

It's a bit like when the Sony CEO offered to pay a bounty for PS3s found on shelves. Be wary of being so confident in your assumptions that you make a promise you can't keep. (Or, relevant but worse.)

EA is run and owned by businessmen. Therefore, everything they do is strictly regulated by how some MBA thinks it should work. The result is that many of their games, and it looks like their store as well (I haven't and won't use it, unless something changes) aren't properly designed. The rule for that kind of software is to remind you about it as often as possible and shove as many products to sell in your face as possible (just like most real stores.) In fact, many of their games are becoming digital store fronts made to sell you DLC (as this comic points out).

Steam on the other hand is made and run by gamers. People who love video games, and who make them because that is what they want to do. Gabe Newell himself plays on Steam. I'd be willing to bet most of the people running EA rarely, if ever, actually play video games. The result is that Steam tries to stay out of your way, and works how gamers expect it to work (for the most part). That is why so many gamers love it, even though it has DRM, and why praising it while ridiculing activation-based DRM is not as hypocritical as many people like to say it is.

On the other hand, it is also why Episode 3 has been delayed so much. They have no businessmen pushing them to release on a deadline. This is both good and bad. Mostly good, but gamers will still bitch about the delay.

You can't choke someone over the internet, until now.

Of course you can! I've seen Darth Vader do it!

You can't choke someone over the internet, until now.

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/05/17

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/06/10

...from ten years ago.

Rhombus with icons on it.

Of course, it may have a PR problem:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/1/9/

But just the moment before that, it's totally like this:

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/09/17

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/07/25

... is "Prefanity".

You've copped some abuse over time, but stuck with it regardless. Congratulations on sticking on regardless of the G.I.F.T.(at times) community.

Heh... Home felt a lot more like what Tycho and Gabe thought of it- at least to me it did...

Did that? Good, now go eat a dick and die, you retarded motherfucker.

Surely you've seen this before.

I agree with the above reasons but the two biggest ones for me were:

1) The death of community. They started cross-realming everything and this ruined any community that existed on a server. Now joining battlegrounds or dungeons removes all accountability and respect. People have no reason to be nice or care how they treat anyone else. See here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/ There were this kind of people before, but they were known based on their reputation. There was the other end of the spectrum as well, you could generate a good reputation for yourself, and you knew other people on your realm besides your own guild. There was a much bigger sense of community.

2) The death of world pvp. BG/Dungeon queues mean no one leaves a city unless they're doing a small subset of daily quests or leveling. They seem to be doing all they can to cut this out of the game. Battlegrounds are an OK substitute but they've forced them to be even more of a point grind. Half the people in there when I was still playing weren't there to win or even for pvp. They were just there for the easy purples. Probably on one of their alts. This also goes back to my previous point about community. There is none in BGs anymore and you get the same sort of trolls, but people try even less because they can get their gear without winning if they lose long enough.

There are plenty of other reasons but these were the root of my lost interest in the game. I enjoyed raiding and battlegrounds, but I enjoyed them with friends or in a community of people I knew had a common goal.

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/08/01

Sums it up pretty nicely.

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/08/01

Relevant penny arcade strip.

heh... http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/8/1/

Pseudonymous usage does not == uncivil assholeishness.

I disagree; and I cite the Internet's finest authority to back me up in it's most famous cartoon:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/

Most of the outrage in this thread sounds a bit like this guy

http://videosift.com/video/Francis-takes-exception-to-Diablo-3

also relevant :)

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/8/8/

Blizzard consistently make some of the worlds most awesome games. If at some point they start churning out crap then I will start to look at moves like this with suspicion. Until that happens though I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt - they have definitely earned it.

About your 10 suggestions for Anonymous... Quite frankly, it's not that kind of an organization.

2. Develop a manner where a person could know what organizations to support and which to avoid.

The thing is, this is mostly picked at random. The only reason they protested Scientology is because of a Tom Cruise video being taken down. It degenerated into the gatherings in front of Scientology buildings, which was a flimsy excuse for many to just find other people like them out there and waste a bit of time. It was a disorganized mob dressed up holding signs with internet memes nobody cared about.

Someone motivated against Scientology noticed the whole Tom Cruise fiasco and used all those kids to get those protests going. And that's where the modern day "Anonymous" (the hacker group) comes from. Bored kids looking for ideologies and wanting to belong to something, and easy to manipulate into doing something. Someone paid close attention to what the guy did to motivate them to protest ("stickin' it to the man"), and put a lot of kids to good use for their own activities.

3. Help inform people about what they do that is positive.

Except they hardly ever do something that is to be considered positive. The whole Sony fiasco wasn't positive. It was just another sign that people are lax with security, which isn't a big surprise. The whole deal of supporting Wikileaks (aka "Let's DDoS Amazon and Paypal") was hardly positive. The few times they've done something positive is to uncover the identity of someone who was abusing animals.

7. Shun asshats.

Due to the nature of anonymous, they're subject to the greater internet fuckwad theory. Even if they were to shun asshats from their "ranks", they're such a loosely organized group of people that anyone can basically claim to be "Anonymous" and they wouldn't have a way to claim otherwise.

10. Develop a future for Anonymous. What is Anonymous in 20yrs?

Working for the very man that they were stickin' it to, hopefully not with a criminal record.

Don't get me wrong, I can to a certain point agree with some of the things they've done. And I can understand that these kids are looking for something that gives them a sense of stickin' it to the man, we've all been there... But I think that they're too easily controlled by external forces and probably due to their average age don't think through about the consequences. I also think that many of the reactions about "Anonymous" have been way out of proportion.

But in all honesty, there are far more notable problems in the world than what these kids are usually making a fuss about, or probably even aware about.

Hes not talking about safety, hes talking about this, and on that count hes not wrong-- people DO behave better when theyre not totally anonymous.

Whether or not we actually want this enforced by an agency with teeth is a totally different conversation (I vote no).

Also, Im not sure I (or Ben, for that matter) would qualify "being anonymous on the internet" as "Essential Liberty". It is a disservice to take the mans words and stretch them way beyond what he was referring to.

Every contract I've ever seen says they promise speeds "up to" a certain amount

Obligatory Penny Arcade: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/5/1/

You've just named the precise reasons that the original Game Boy beat its competitors:

- Better battery life (as in a USABLE battery life)
- Better games

3DS has nothing in the way of a "killer app", the screen issues are still problematic, and I know of nobody willing to pay that much for a portable device for gaming. Then again, I also remember the fiasco that was the original GBA, which didn't even have a backlight and couldn't be played without arranging a ton of lamps like some professional fucking photography studio. It was downright hilarious when I saw someone take apart their GBA SP and they discovered that Nintendo had literally ripped off the Afterburner design for their own GBA lighting system.

Obligatory Penny-Arcade:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/6/15/

You make me laugh. Which one are you? http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/2/12/

I think Twitter's success is in its simplicity. I'm not on a high horse or anything; I've very few tweets, and I started my illustrious tweeting with a re-hash of a Penny Arcade strip.

So, now that any potential Twitter cred I might have had is out the window (Twitcred? Tweetcred?), the fact is Twitter is a vastly dumbed-down blogging service that lets anyone post whatever inane minutiae of their life they may feel compelled to share with the rest of us. I'll admit there's a certain bit of creativity in trying to cram something of substance within 140 characters. The funny bit is that practically no tweets actually have any substance in them.

I wish there were a more worksafe (or pre-school safe?) term for it that captured it just as well (as opposed to "deindividualization"), because it's such a good point. If you (or your kids, or your parents) experience chat with people who are effectively anonymous, a significant portion of those people may act like jerks.

Penny-Arcade also has a SFW version: Greater Internet Dickwad Theory.

That's still not exactly school-safe, although you might be able to get away with "Jackass" for a younger audience... at least until Democratic fuckwads and Republican shitcocks started accusing you of bringing politics into it. :)

John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

I believe the technical term is Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/

And as I pointed out in my original post, it leads to the unfortunate scenario where people don't seem to give due consideration to what they're actually saying, before they say it.

No, people being dicks causes them to not give due consideration to what they're actually saying.

And as this case pertains to an "online call to shoot [the] President", I'd like you to meet the GIFT.

It's kind of cute how you seem to think stopping people from saying it will make them better people. Supposing you actually do enforce the speechcrime laws consistently enough to affect behavior, all you'll do is make the assholes find new expressions ("code words", if you will) that skirt the legal boundaries while leaving no doubt where they stand. A solid society can fix any number of problems with government, but a government can't fix societal problems.

Sometimes a man needs a little G.

Have you taken your meds today Alex dear? I guess not since we are talking about a SPAMMING DOMAIN where NOBODY but your crazy tinfoil hat wearing ass has mentioned ANYTHING about operating systems? Are you REALLY that fucking paranoid? Or does the thought of being next to my large southern manmeat get you so wet between your legs you gotta break out the tweezrs and hope I respond?

But don't worry my little bitch, when OS talks come around I'll be happy to point out those wonderful links that you never seem to be able to respond to, you know, the ones that make you wet yourself? Ones like...oh say Dell has to run their own repos because Linux shits itself and breaks drivers otherwise or your hero Linus, in his own words mind you, saying Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!

So please, keep it up my little bitch. I do so love and consider it a public service to point out hypocrisy and bullshit whenever and wherever I find it. the fact that you can't even contemplate that a retailer would try your precious turd sandwich and find that it is shit? That it MUST be some right wing conspiracy involving Bill Gates and the illuminati? Just shows what a bunch of crazy fuckwits hang around the Linux "community". Oh and for those that want to see Alex here is a pretty good likeness. Enjoy!

The Tetris Movie

The Angry Birds movie.

and that Tetris film

You mean this one?