> Is it really worth hacking a damn weather > satellite when you can turn on any news station
no, but it's fun.
Dorking around with technology is the entire point of being a geek. If you have to question why these people shouldn't have done this, I question your geektitude.;)
It's like climbing a mountain.. just do it because it's there.
Re:What the hell?
on
Myth II Updated
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
> Since when does slashdot post game updates?
My guess is because it's such an odd story.
The people who created this patch aren't being paid for it, it's done entirely by fans of the game (who they are I can't tell, because the mythdev site doesn't have a list available..), they're doing it for free, and apparently doing it without support of the people who actually own the Myth francise (godgames).
Very few details have been released about what sort of deal transpired that convinced a publishing house to permit a bunch of random people all over the world to extend and enhance a game.. without trying to cash in on the deal.
It's not the updating of Myth that's important, but how it came to be.
Plus Myth is one of the best games ever so it does deserve the attention anyways.;)
> how do they know that this *particular* asteroid > wiped out most of the species on the planet 65 > million years ago?
obviously they can't, with irrefutable "ah-ha this is it!" evidence. However they can narrow down the range of options for a specific candidate with things like core samples.
when an asteroid hits, it reorders the earth around it in some fairly identifiable ways. I don't know all the specifics, but it is rather common for geologists to date asteroid impacts by analyzing not just the dirt above the old crater, but the dirt below it too.
For example, if you take a core sample from a known undisturbed part of the planet, and identify at what age any specific depth was the surface of the earth, you can compare this sample to a sample taken from a suspected asteroid impact crater and date it that way.
Under the impact crater, there will be undisturbed material (fossils, stones, etc). Above it will be a messy jumble of everything, from bits of glass formed in the heat of the impact, to shattered rocks, a complete reordering of dirt layers.. stuff like that.
if you can link an event in earth's history (eg, dinosaurs going extinct) to the timeline a core sample reveals, you can get a pretty good guess for what the cause of the event was.
> Too many assumptions are taking place, it's really > a waste of resources.
but it's still fun to try.
for those of us humans (ie, nearly all) who will never be granted the privilege of escaping earth's orbit, or even less taking a picture of something new, or even more remotely cruising through the cosmos, taking part in silly projects like seti@home is about the closest we'll ever get to helping accomplish something in space.
for those of us who still want to take part in space exploration, seti@home is the easiest, most reachable, way for joe schmoe to join in on it. Just because it's probably futile doesn't mean it's a "waste".
I don't use floppies for much more than install disks for linux anymore, so pretty much any disk I have rotting in the closet is fair game for a reformatting to serve as a boot disk. I've gone through stacks of disks, one goes bad, I toss it out and pick the next one on the stack.. except for this one ancient maxell floppy I have.
I used it back when my parents got their 486 (in the early 90's) for holding windows 3.11, it was an OEM release and the first time you loaded the machine it prompted you through swapping disks to copy out recovery disks.
This disk has followed me in moving about the country four times now, it's gone from alaska to oregon to new jersey to california to illinois. Currently it's a boot disk for redhat 7.1, and I use it at work several times a week.
No it's not a 20 year old calculator, but considering most claim floppy disks have two year lifespans, the fact this is STILL my most reliable floppy makes it interesting. It even has the original "Windows 3.11 disk 8" label I wrote up for it on it, scribbled out. Underneath it is written "slackware #1" and "redhat boot".
> Either the submitter ignored it or the "editor" censored it
do you have any evidence of slashdot editors editing news story text to alter the spin on it, or are you just playing the role of tin foil hat boy?
My initial assumption is that very little editing goes on (considering the number of times in the past anchor tags have had no closing doublequote on the url..) but in the interests of not eating my foot for dinner I'll grant the benefit of the doubt and let you substantiate your insinuations.
at any rate I would hazard that there's very little "bending over" going on here. Free expression and advertising are generally at odds with each other, and I'll hazard this is going to die a wimpering death.
By their very nature, blogs will resist corporate subversion.
If the parties involved are actively seeking to fix the problem, in a timely manner, I see no harm in not shouting from the mountain top what the problem is.
Full disclosure after a patch is done, yes. But doing it before serves no purpose but to conform to some wishy washy idealism and potentially amplifies the damage an exploit could cause.
And I'm talking in terms of a couple days. If the affected parties hit the snooze button and two weeks roll by, then yes, release the info and make fun of them for the havoc it causes.;)
I think linux needs to put effort into shedding whatever hardcoded hardware limits it has remaining.
Maybe solaris and irix have the same limits, I don't know, I don't really care. I just hate how it seems like every other year or so someone bumps into some weird arbitrary limit and you gotta apply a patch to the source tree until it gets included in the base. Like the bigmem patch. Why is that even neccessary? Why is there a size limit to swap files? What about CPU number limits?
I don't claim to be a developer, and I don't really care about the details why or why not it can't work. I'm just saying that from the user's perspective, seemingly arbitrary limits on how big your hardware can be looks stupid and unprofessional. One would like to think that a few carefully coded routines could let linux scale itself to any system you try to install it on.
Some friend and I got to a third friend's house just after he'd finished bolting his new motherboard into the case.. without using those little risers they give you to seperate the board from the chassis.
He couldn't figure out why the thing wouldn't power on. Every solder joint on the board had been short circuited to each other for who knows how many flips of the power switch.
Fearing the worst we corrected the installation and powered it up.. machine promptly gave us a cheerful beep as it completed POST.
I know you're joking, but it should be a valuable example to the anti-slashdot trolls that just because something didn't happen within the past 8 hours doesn't mean it is an uninteresting story.
I suppose implying an old story is new could be worth a valid complaint, but the simple act of posting something "old" isn't inherently wrong. Slashdot is at it's best when it directs us to links that focus on nerdly curiosities.. I don't care when it was created, if I haven't read it before it qualifies as "news".
I didn't say it was practical, or suggest that the density would be anything to write home about.. but the fact of it is, we haven't yet been able to develop a digital storage format that is longer lived than punch cards.;)
i'm sure something better that's got a life of a thousand years or more will come along eventually, but speaking in the here and now the only way to get that is with holes in a piece of paper.
> There are plenty of books that last hundreds of > years if kept in appropriate conditions.
My suspicion is that punch cards will make a return at some point.;) No, really. Not only does it resolve the longevity issue, but it could also solve the issue of obsolete reading hardware (seems to me it'd be easier for a distant generation to rig up a punch card reader than a cd-rom drive). Punch cards are in a rather obvious format as well, if worst came to worst and humanity nuked itself back to the stone age.. in ten thousand years a disc that looks like a mirror is probably harder to translate than a piece of paper with regularily spaced holes.
I think the only difference will end up being the material used; how many centuries could a stainless steel plate with pin sized holes last in a library's basement?
It's been over a year and it was a long, long book (but well worth the read), but I don't recall the "blonde strategy" ever being in those pages. The blunt "let's just go have sex" scene was in there however.:p
And I don't think I should have to put up with businesses interrupting my private life just because they want to make an extra buck.
Since I doubt these companies are going to change their behavior on their own, and they sure as heck won't stop because I ask them to.. that kind of leaves uncle sam to take care of the problem, doesn't it?
That's what the government is there for, to make my life easier (or safer).
The point your quote misses out on, however, is that there is is no "reliable" way of getting into space. It's dangerous like playing russian roulette, you go up there with several thousand pounds of explosives attached to your ass, and you come back down in the middle of a plasma fireball. Between those two events you're seperated from an intense vacuum by nothing more than a few inches of steel and some ceramic tiles.
How many people have died trying to get into space? 14 from the challenger and columbia, shoot from the hip says no more than double that have died?
That is only the start of it. Many many more brave men and women are going to die trying to turn us humans into a spacefaring race. This is hostile, hostile environment and we aren't supposed to be going there if evolution has anything to say about it. Playing a game of tortise and retreating into our shell "for a decade" every time there's a problem is defeatist, not going to make space a fluffy paradise where children run free, and will in the long run increase the costs of space exploration because we get so wrapped up in our politicaly correct bureaucracy that nothing revolutionary ever happens.
Every man and woman who's died in space did it with the full knowledge this was one of the most dangerous jobs they could have picked. I see no reason to insult their sacrifice by scurrying under rocks, pretending like it's only a matter of time before a 100% safe route into space evolves.
it's not at issue, from what little I pay attention to the anti-office crusade I see it's mostly an issue of open standards.
linux zealots wouldn't give two bits about Office, either microsoft's or sun's, if the file formats had been open and documented. Because competitive full featured suites would have popped into existence 5 years ago.
think where open source could be today if the community was able to boast a complete clone (for lack of a better word) of microsoft office. Not just claim it now.. but years ago.
> It's scary to see such strife within the Open > Source community. I'd much prefer, as would we > all, a focus on our true enemies,
The world isn't black and white, it has shades of every color. Arguments like this, the self policing of the open source community, will in the long run make open source stronger.
I wouldn't have it any other way, sometimes the best way to get a problem solved is to bruise some egos.
There's two types of AI, practical AI, and a sentient type (or one that pretends to be sentient I guess).
"Practical" AI is having a piece of machinery that has been programmed to take a limited set of input, perform some action, then repeat to infinity. The robots that manufacture cars do this, and this tetris bot does this.
"Sentient" AI is probably more what you're talking about. It handles language processing, making inferences, stuff like that.
It is intelligent in that it can do a task without human interaction, so yes it qualifies as "AI".
> out of the box, renders fonts so that they look > good to non-nerds. This is the first step towards > bringing Linux to the masses!
eh? When did font rendering become the holy grail of desktop interfaces? Near as I could both windows and macos were accepted at home long before anti-alaised fonts were available. Even now windows uses the same default sans-serif font they've been using since windows95, text doesn't read any smoother or easier than it did 8 years ago.
seems to me it has more to do with mob mentality and available software.
Everyone else uses windows, so obviously random computer buyer should buy windows too. Aisle after aisle at best buy has windows software in it, so obviously random computer buyer should buy windows to run all of it.
That certainly explains why the security at fermilab walks around unarmed. I mean if they had explosives that large to protect that's exactly what I'd do, make sure my security team would be unable to fend off attackers!
Nothing at fermi is classified, the closest they come is putting warning stickers up for areas that produce radiation.. which is simply a side effect of high energy physics.
> This is very shallow reasoning, but unfortunately > very common. When the line between animals and > humans is blurred, treating humans as animals > becomes ethically justifiable.
You got a good point.. but in response, again I say, what makes humans so special that we should treat ourselves better than we do animals?:)
I'm not a PETA nutjob or anything, I'm simply acting as a devil's advocate.
Put it this way, if there was some higher conscience out there, something so advanced that humans and other animals would appear equally primitive, what do humans have that would make them a less likely target for experimentation?
Or in the moral sense, what would this advanced conscience see in the behavior of humans compared to the behavior of mice that would encourage them to decide that devaluing humans was worse than devaluing mice?
The entire human history is barely a word long in the novel that is the entire universe. I have no expectation that anyone out there sees me as anything of value, and while I do have a vested interest in staying alive, I do it with the detachment to realize I'm equally as important as the aforementioned mouse.
These guys do have a reasonable expectation to be able to profit off their inventions. Many linux distros encourage you to pay for support, how is this any different from them requiring you to pay for the manual?
Since it is open source, one could argue that all the documentation you could possibly need is already available to you.. just read the source.;)
Is it a little underhanded, yes. But there's nothing terribly unethical about it.
Depending on the license of the software (site is already too hosed for me to find it myself), there's nothing stopping you from forking your own branch of the source, documenting that, and continue on your merry way.
> If the game isn't fun and sucks this badly, why > would anyone play it? Well, because they are > addicted. They are addicted to the mobs, to the > loot, and to the social atmosphere with other > people in their guilds.
Just because this ONE GUY doesn't like the game anymore and has noticed he's only playing because he's addicted does NOT by implication include the rest of the playerbase.
For some, the teamwork, that "social atmosphere" he so briefly mentioned is enough to make the game "fun". Yeah don't get me wrong getting loot and riches or whatever aids in the fun, but since there aren't too many avenues in the real world for a person like me to participate in team oriented "adventures" (for lack of a better term), doing it in EQ is good enough.
I log out when the game frustrates me, I log out when I'm bored, and only play when I want to help out friends get stuff done. I'm even a member of a so called "uber" guild, which means 99% of my playtime involves one of the mentioned "timesinks".
I despise Sony (Verant if you prefer) as much as the next guy, but the game itself is still fun because it's one of the few ventures out there for paper pushing desk jocks like me to take part in a team "sport". Suffice to say I don't appreciate this guy herding me into his definition of EQ and the people who play it. He can be mad all he wants, and I hope he deals with his addiction.
Slashdot Mirror
> Is it really worth hacking a damn weather
;)
> satellite when you can turn on any news station
no, but it's fun.
Dorking around with technology is the entire point of being a geek. If you have to question why these people shouldn't have done this, I question your geektitude.
It's like climbing a mountain.. just do it because it's there.
> Since when does slashdot post game updates?
;)
My guess is because it's such an odd story.
The people who created this patch aren't being paid for it, it's done entirely by fans of the game (who they are I can't tell, because the mythdev site doesn't have a list available..), they're doing it for free, and apparently doing it without support of the people who actually own the Myth francise (godgames).
Very few details have been released about what sort of deal transpired that convinced a publishing house to permit a bunch of random people all over the world to extend and enhance a game.. without trying to cash in on the deal.
It's not the updating of Myth that's important, but how it came to be.
Plus Myth is one of the best games ever so it does deserve the attention anyways.
> how do they know that this *particular* asteroid
> wiped out most of the species on the planet 65
> million years ago?
obviously they can't, with irrefutable "ah-ha this is it!" evidence. However they can narrow down the range of options for a specific candidate with things like core samples.
when an asteroid hits, it reorders the earth around it in some fairly identifiable ways. I don't know all the specifics, but it is rather common for geologists to date asteroid impacts by analyzing not just the dirt above the old crater, but the dirt below it too.
For example, if you take a core sample from a known undisturbed part of the planet, and identify at what age any specific depth was the surface of the earth, you can compare this sample to a sample taken from a suspected asteroid impact crater and date it that way.
Under the impact crater, there will be undisturbed material (fossils, stones, etc). Above it will be a messy jumble of everything, from bits of glass formed in the heat of the impact, to shattered rocks, a complete reordering of dirt layers.. stuff like that.
if you can link an event in earth's history (eg, dinosaurs going extinct) to the timeline a core sample reveals, you can get a pretty good guess for what the cause of the event was.
> Too many assumptions are taking place, it's really
;)
> a waste of resources.
but it's still fun to try.
for those of us humans (ie, nearly all) who will never be granted the privilege of escaping earth's orbit, or even less taking a picture of something new, or even more remotely cruising through the cosmos, taking part in silly projects like seti@home is about the closest we'll ever get to helping accomplish something in space.
for those of us who still want to take part in space exploration, seti@home is the easiest, most reachable, way for joe schmoe to join in on it. Just because it's probably futile doesn't mean it's a "waste".
It's still fun, like playing a cosmic lottery.
I don't use floppies for much more than install disks for linux anymore, so pretty much any disk I have rotting in the closet is fair game for a reformatting to serve as a boot disk. I've gone through stacks of disks, one goes bad, I toss it out and pick the next one on the stack.. except for this one ancient maxell floppy I have.
;)
I used it back when my parents got their 486 (in the early 90's) for holding windows 3.11, it was an OEM release and the first time you loaded the machine it prompted you through swapping disks to copy out recovery disks.
This disk has followed me in moving about the country four times now, it's gone from alaska to oregon to new jersey to california to illinois. Currently it's a boot disk for redhat 7.1, and I use it at work several times a week.
No it's not a 20 year old calculator, but considering most claim floppy disks have two year lifespans, the fact this is STILL my most reliable floppy makes it interesting. It even has the original "Windows 3.11 disk 8" label I wrote up for it on it, scribbled out. Underneath it is written "slackware #1" and "redhat boot".
They really don't make 'em like they used to.
> Either the submitter ignored it or the "editor" censored it
do you have any evidence of slashdot editors editing news story text to alter the spin on it, or are you just playing the role of tin foil hat boy?
My initial assumption is that very little editing goes on (considering the number of times in the past anchor tags have had no closing doublequote on the url..) but in the interests of not eating my foot for dinner I'll grant the benefit of the doubt and let you substantiate your insinuations.
> bend over a little more..
wait, you mean people actually read weblogs?!
at any rate I would hazard that there's very little "bending over" going on here. Free expression and advertising are generally at odds with each other, and I'll hazard this is going to die a wimpering death.
By their very nature, blogs will resist corporate subversion.
hardly.
;)
If the parties involved are actively seeking to fix the problem, in a timely manner, I see no harm in not shouting from the mountain top what the problem is.
Full disclosure after a patch is done, yes. But doing it before serves no purpose but to conform to some wishy washy idealism and potentially amplifies the damage an exploit could cause.
And I'm talking in terms of a couple days. If the affected parties hit the snooze button and two weeks roll by, then yes, release the info and make fun of them for the havoc it causes.
I think linux needs to put effort into shedding whatever hardcoded hardware limits it has remaining.
Maybe solaris and irix have the same limits, I don't know, I don't really care. I just hate how it seems like every other year or so someone bumps into some weird arbitrary limit and you gotta apply a patch to the source tree until it gets included in the base. Like the bigmem patch. Why is that even neccessary? Why is there a size limit to swap files? What about CPU number limits?
I don't claim to be a developer, and I don't really care about the details why or why not it can't work. I'm just saying that from the user's perspective, seemingly arbitrary limits on how big your hardware can be looks stupid and unprofessional. One would like to think that a few carefully coded routines could let linux scale itself to any system you try to install it on.
Some friend and I got to a third friend's house just after he'd finished bolting his new motherboard into the case.. without using those little risers they give you to seperate the board from the chassis.
He couldn't figure out why the thing wouldn't power on. Every solder joint on the board had been short circuited to each other for who knows how many flips of the power switch.
Fearing the worst we corrected the installation and powered it up.. machine promptly gave us a cheerful beep as it completed POST.
phew.
I know you're joking, but it should be a valuable example to the anti-slashdot trolls that just because something didn't happen within the past 8 hours doesn't mean it is an uninteresting story.
I suppose implying an old story is new could be worth a valid complaint, but the simple act of posting something "old" isn't inherently wrong. Slashdot is at it's best when it directs us to links that focus on nerdly curiosities.. I don't care when it was created, if I haven't read it before it qualifies as "news".
I didn't say it was practical, or suggest that the density would be anything to write home about.. but the fact of it is, we haven't yet been able to develop a digital storage format that is longer lived than punch cards. ;)
i'm sure something better that's got a life of a thousand years or more will come along eventually, but speaking in the here and now the only way to get that is with holes in a piece of paper.
> There are plenty of books that last hundreds of
;) No, really. Not only does it resolve the longevity issue, but it could also solve the issue of obsolete reading hardware (seems to me it'd be easier for a distant generation to rig up a punch card reader than a cd-rom drive). Punch cards are in a rather obvious format as well, if worst came to worst and humanity nuked itself back to the stone age.. in ten thousand years a disc that looks like a mirror is probably harder to translate than a piece of paper with regularily spaced holes.
> years if kept in appropriate conditions.
My suspicion is that punch cards will make a return at some point.
I think the only difference will end up being the material used; how many centuries could a stainless steel plate with pin sized holes last in a library's basement?
> (/book, which I haven't read yet)
:p
It's been over a year and it was a long, long book (but well worth the read), but I don't recall the "blonde strategy" ever being in those pages. The blunt "let's just go have sex" scene was in there however.
I'd attribute it to dressing up the screenplay.
And I don't think I should have to put up with businesses interrupting my private life just because they want to make an extra buck.
Since I doubt these companies are going to change their behavior on their own, and they sure as heck won't stop because I ask them to.. that kind of leaves uncle sam to take care of the problem, doesn't it?
That's what the government is there for, to make my life easier (or safer).
The point your quote misses out on, however, is that there is is no "reliable" way of getting into space. It's dangerous like playing russian roulette, you go up there with several thousand pounds of explosives attached to your ass, and you come back down in the middle of a plasma fireball. Between those two events you're seperated from an intense vacuum by nothing more than a few inches of steel and some ceramic tiles.
How many people have died trying to get into space? 14 from the challenger and columbia, shoot from the hip says no more than double that have died?
That is only the start of it. Many many more brave men and women are going to die trying to turn us humans into a spacefaring race. This is hostile, hostile environment and we aren't supposed to be going there if evolution has anything to say about it. Playing a game of tortise and retreating into our shell "for a decade" every time there's a problem is defeatist, not going to make space a fluffy paradise where children run free, and will in the long run increase the costs of space exploration because we get so wrapped up in our politicaly correct bureaucracy that nothing revolutionary ever happens.
Every man and woman who's died in space did it with the full knowledge this was one of the most dangerous jobs they could have picked. I see no reason to insult their sacrifice by scurrying under rocks, pretending like it's only a matter of time before a 100% safe route into space evolves.
it's not at issue, from what little I pay attention to the anti-office crusade I see it's mostly an issue of open standards.
linux zealots wouldn't give two bits about Office, either microsoft's or sun's, if the file formats had been open and documented. Because competitive full featured suites would have popped into existence 5 years ago.
think where open source could be today if the community was able to boast a complete clone (for lack of a better word) of microsoft office. Not just claim it now.. but years ago.
> It's scary to see such strife within the Open
> Source community. I'd much prefer, as would we
> all, a focus on our true enemies,
The world isn't black and white, it has shades of every color. Arguments like this, the self policing of the open source community, will in the long run make open source stronger.
I wouldn't have it any other way, sometimes the best way to get a problem solved is to bruise some egos.
There's two types of AI, practical AI, and a sentient type (or one that pretends to be sentient I guess).
"Practical" AI is having a piece of machinery that has been programmed to take a limited set of input, perform some action, then repeat to infinity. The robots that manufacture cars do this, and this tetris bot does this.
"Sentient" AI is probably more what you're talking about. It handles language processing, making inferences, stuff like that.
It is intelligent in that it can do a task without human interaction, so yes it qualifies as "AI".
> out of the box, renders fonts so that they look
> good to non-nerds. This is the first step towards
> bringing Linux to the masses!
eh? When did font rendering become the holy grail of desktop interfaces? Near as I could both windows and macos were accepted at home long before anti-alaised fonts were available. Even now windows uses the same default sans-serif font they've been using since windows95, text doesn't read any smoother or easier than it did 8 years ago.
seems to me it has more to do with mob mentality and available software.
Everyone else uses windows, so obviously random computer buyer should buy windows too. Aisle after aisle at best buy has windows software in it, so obviously random computer buyer should buy windows to run all of it.
I like Gill Bates better.
Then hire a servant, "Master Bates, dinner is served.."
That certainly explains why the security at fermilab walks around unarmed. I mean if they had explosives that large to protect that's exactly what I'd do, make sure my security team would be unable to fend off attackers!
Nothing at fermi is classified, the closest they come is putting warning stickers up for areas that produce radiation.. which is simply a side effect of high energy physics.
> This is very shallow reasoning, but unfortunately
:)
> very common. When the line between animals and
> humans is blurred, treating humans as animals
> becomes ethically justifiable.
You got a good point.. but in response, again I say, what makes humans so special that we should treat ourselves better than we do animals?
I'm not a PETA nutjob or anything, I'm simply acting as a devil's advocate.
Put it this way, if there was some higher conscience out there, something so advanced that humans and other animals would appear equally primitive, what do humans have that would make them a less likely target for experimentation?
Or in the moral sense, what would this advanced conscience see in the behavior of humans compared to the behavior of mice that would encourage them to decide that devaluing humans was worse than devaluing mice?
The entire human history is barely a word long in the novel that is the entire universe. I have no expectation that anyone out there sees me as anything of value, and while I do have a vested interest in staying alive, I do it with the detachment to realize I'm equally as important as the aforementioned mouse.
These guys do have a reasonable expectation to be able to profit off their inventions. Many linux distros encourage you to pay for support, how is this any different from them requiring you to pay for the manual?
;)
Since it is open source, one could argue that all the documentation you could possibly need is already available to you.. just read the source.
Is it a little underhanded, yes. But there's nothing terribly unethical about it.
Depending on the license of the software (site is already too hosed for me to find it myself), there's nothing stopping you from forking your own branch of the source, documenting that, and continue on your merry way.
> If the game isn't fun and sucks this badly, why
;)
> would anyone play it? Well, because they are
> addicted. They are addicted to the mobs, to the
> loot, and to the social atmosphere with other
> people in their guilds.
Just because this ONE GUY doesn't like the game anymore and has noticed he's only playing because he's addicted does NOT by implication include the rest of the playerbase.
For some, the teamwork, that "social atmosphere" he so briefly mentioned is enough to make the game "fun". Yeah don't get me wrong getting loot and riches or whatever aids in the fun, but since there aren't too many avenues in the real world for a person like me to participate in team oriented "adventures" (for lack of a better term), doing it in EQ is good enough.
I log out when the game frustrates me, I log out when I'm bored, and only play when I want to help out friends get stuff done. I'm even a member of a so called "uber" guild, which means 99% of my playtime involves one of the mentioned "timesinks".
I despise Sony (Verant if you prefer) as much as the next guy, but the game itself is still fun because it's one of the few ventures out there for paper pushing desk jocks like me to take part in a team "sport". Suffice to say I don't appreciate this guy herding me into his definition of EQ and the people who play it. He can be mad all he wants, and I hope he deals with his addiction.
Just don't include me in it.