Nice job, Hollywood. You just elevated TPB in the eyes of the general public and made yourselves look like even bigger villians than you already did.
I'm not so sure of that, the general public will never hear of this lawsuit. Slashdotters and other tech-site readers will, but they will have been bombarded with movie/copyright stories already.
Ah the Google+ haters. I and millions of others use Google+ every day. We just use it for things other than whining about stupid shit and complaining about High School like what you find on Facebook. Unlike Facebook I find Google+ to actually be useful. Hate all you want, bitch about how Grandma and little Tina in 10th grade aren't using it. I really don't give a fuck. I'm just glad you and the other whining bitches aren't on it. Thanks for staying away.
"millions" of users? If you think anything other a minuscule fraction of Google's "390 million" figure are actually active accounts, then you are either hopelessly naive, have drunk the kool-aid fanboy-style, or are getting kickbacks from Google.
Worse, I have two separate Google accounts which, for various reasons, I want to keep completely separate. Somehow Google figured out that I wanted to combine them in some sort of single-signon -- I know for sure I would never have done that intentionally. Now my real name is linked with that alternate account, which -sucks-, and I don't know how to decouple them again, or if the damage is already done.
Ugh. Skype. Well, it's better than Steam as a chat client, I'll give it that (Steam is terrible), but it pales compared to the other options.
My problem is with 3rd-party integration, especially under Linux. See, I don't want to use the Skype client. I don't want to run a Skype client, an AIM client, a Yahoo client, an IRC client, a... etcetc. I just want one client, that has all my contacts on various networks together with a client I control, logs things in the same format to the same location... etc. Pidgin does this for me. It's fantastic(ish). But unfortunately, skype is not a purely-open protocol, and you still have to run the 'official skype client.' Then, a plugin bridges pidgin and skype. I guess I'd be ok with that, except the skype client is kindof buggy. Sometimes it just hangs entirely, and it'll take awhile before I notice, kill, and restart it. I can't debug it to figure out what it's doing; it's closed source, so who knows. Or sometimes it'll still be working, but it'll silently disconnect from skype, then when I kill the client and reconnect, I get a flood of messages that had been sent that I'd missed. Never had these sorts of problems on other chat networks, and the closed nature is why I'm a bit down on skype compared to open-protocol networks.
Eh, I don't think Google Groups destroyed Usenet, newsgroups were well, well on their way out by then. The rise of the web destroyed newsgroups, and the rise of forums on individual websites.
Spam also destroyed just about any non-moderated newsgroup; certainly all the ones that I paid attention to.
I can cut a 2013 teacher some slack for disciplining a student for bitching about homework. But I can't cut anyone slack in 2013 for not knowing "gay" is a generic pejorative. If you don't know gay is a generic pejorative by now, then you also probably missed the memo that it means homosexual. You probably think it means "happy."
Words. They're like tech skills. Keep up or be left behind.
Dude, don't be such a nigger about word definitions.
Oh, you didn't know "nigger" means aggressive and hardcore now? Get with the program, words change meaning all the time.
Every Star Trek series has had its moments of sheer mediocrity where the wrong people were clearly in charge, and they made lighter and fluffier decisions. For the original TV series, the first two years were decent, but in the third year the studio brought in the producer from Lost in Space and he really changed the feel of the show. Spock's Brain was his first episode.
For the next gen, you had horrible writers in the first two seasons (Maurice Hurley in particular) and a bit too heavy-handed control from Roddenberry. In the third season, he steps back a bit, Hurley is fired, and Ronald D. Moore and Michael Pillar join the show. Noticeable increase in quality. Too late to save the character of Wesley Crusher, though.
Really? What ideas were tested in this magical cauldron of Trek-ness? I keep hearing this claim that Trek was some sort of idea factory, in much the same way that I keep hearing about "hurr durr lens flare." I'd wager that, just like most of the people whining about lens flare only noticed it after they read somebody else's opinion about the lens flare in the film, most of the people carping endlessly about the "big ideas" of the original Trek series are simply doing so because somebody else said that there were big ideas in it.
It's not too hard to see these ideas in play. I'd say a valid criticism of Star Trek was that it was usually fairly unsubtle about it and tried to hit you over the head with their point in case slower members of the audience weren't getting it.
Red Matter was fairly silly. The new movie has its flaws, but at least it doesn't have anything as silly as red matter! Spock and Uhura was implied, though never outright shown, in the original series. Besides, this is an alternate timeline. Frankly, the main continuity is a mess, and it's entirely mined out. No more, please. No new series please, not for awhile. I'm still trying to get the bad taste of the last two shitty Trek TV series out of my mouth.
Most people involved in IP don't consider them "pretend" property. They consider them special cases of actual property. Property rights that are extremely easy to infringe on, perhaps in some cases impossible not to infringe on them.
Music doesn't make copies of itself if let alone. Life does. Plant a few of these in a field (maybe near natural soybeans), leave them alone for a few years, and you might have a lot more of them. Actively cultivate them and you can multiply them exponentially. If Monsanto wanted to be the sole seller of these beans, they should never sell them until gathered and sterilized via gamma radiation. Selling them as seed is inviting someone to do exactly what this farmer did.
Let those seeds sit on a shelf and they won't do much. Certainly not enough to get anyone into legal trouble.
But we don't need to get into theoreticals. The farmer did the work of planting and cultivating the seeds. The growth of the crops wasn't accidental.
I think the combination of a lot of those numbers comes from several servers that has basically died, and people simply giving up instead of transferring. Fix your broken servers Blizzard, you have too many.
They don't need to consolidate servers really, as now the zones themselves are cross-server. You'll find yourself running into other people from other servers all the time now. In fact, this is the first time I've seen low-level zones actively quested in since the game was released.
As a healer in Vanilla. Sorry. Healing was never complex. If anything it's more complex now than it was back when healers had 2-3 healing spells, 1 HoT and 1 cleansing spell.
Yeah, but you could downrank heals back then to through heals on more targets without going out of mana. That sounded interesting, though I wasn't a healer back then.
I was glad that when I got to 58 that I could switch to BC as there might be mobs that I don't two hit but that didn't last long
This is the one reason why I hope that Outland never gets redesigned the same way the earlier zones were. There's still some pve challenge there, and if you're undergeared, the level 70-90 zones can be quite challenging.. you're not one or two-shotting everything because your gear is 20 levels behind. That might be the best way to do it.
You may try looking at the forums on the Blizzard website for your realm, as many guilds post recruitment letters there (it's one of the few places I go when I try recruiting for my guild). Even if not, if you post "hey, I'm looking for a guild.." there, you're sure to get some interest unless that particular realm is really dead.
(And hey, if you're the Remus Shepherd I remember from early '90s Usenet newsgroups, I'd certainly welcome you!)
They tried that and got qqed to death the troll heroics that were actually fun were not push over rofl stomp.
Are you talking about the resigned Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub 5-mans that were launched mid-Cataclysm? I think the qqing started earlier, 5-man heroics were about the same difficulty at the start of the expansion, and all the people who got used to the faceroll ease of Wrath 5-mans complained. I found it refreshing. I really liked it, and I was disappointed when the last round of 5-mans for Cataclysm were pathetically easy (and were in Mists as well).
I particularly like DDO for the ubiquitous voice (all groups/raids have voice, no need for teamspeak or anything) so that you can explain stuff on the mic as you play. Sadly, DDO is suffering from low server populations these days, and pugs can barely be found in the first place, but one can hope that more of the new MMOs add voice by default.
That seems to be the last thing I would want. Reading raid chat can be bad enough, the last thing I want to hear is some teenager screaming into the microphone because someone made a mistake and we wiped. Or someone's musical selection. Or someone farting into the microphone. Ubiquitous voice chat sucks. >_>
I also had no problem with Wine. Granted, I had to figure out how to install it in Wine (hint: do NOT use game DVDs, use the downloadable installer), and remember to disable ActiveX in favor of OpenGL, but other than that, it was gravy. In fact, WoW is one of the most compatible major Windows programs to use with Wine.
The DVDs tended to work better (well faster on my slow DSL) for me... once I had turned off the mount option that honors the 'hidden' flag.
First of all, DirectX is -extremely- difficult to get working under Wine with Wow. Part of this is because Wow can use both DirectX and OpenGL, so everyone uses OpenGL under Linux, and DirectX development and bugfixes get short shrift. The problem is that there has been no in-game development of OpenGL for years now, so none of the graphical improvements that were added in the four years or so will work -- no smart shadows, no improved water effects, no sunshafts.
WoW has always been a struggle against wine and cedega. "Hmmm, why does my FPS drop to 10 in raids? What feature can I turn off to bump the FPS? Why am I getting half the framerate I should be getting? Oh god, wine uses 2GB of virtual memory now, if I don't kill my web browser my computer will swap to a halt."
What's worse is that towards the end of Cataclysm, it became been almost impossible to get the new multi-threaded update downloader to work right (it just causes wine to crash). I know it hadn't been fixed by the time MoP came around, so if you were Linux-only you had no way of playing the game. From what I'd heard, most wine-wow players updated on a Windows host and then copied the files over. As a Linux player it was pretty common that you couldn't play on patch day without some tweaking (perhaps installing the newest, newest version of wine), but this took it to another level.
I would say "normal mode" raid encounters can be quite challenging, depending on how far along you are.
I think that Wrath killed WoW (even though I'm still playing as much as I ever have, as are my friends). When it was introduced, Naxx10 was... dead simple. Extremely easy, tuned for beginner players. Raid finder today is the same way, but I sortof expect that. Regular 10/25 instances are still challenging, and heroic mode 10/25 instances are just as challenging as old-school raids. Wrath, however, set an expectation -- 5-mans should be -extremely- easy, raids should be a cakewalk. I think it gave everyone the wrong expectation, and when Cataclysm raids came out, there was such an outcry over how "difficult" they were. Same with the 5-man instances that came with Cataclysm -- they were roughly on par with vanilla's 5-man instances.
Awhile ago I attended a talk given by Alexander Payne (writer/director of Sideways, The Descendants, About Schmidt, Election). He felt that these days, the best writing in entertainment is happening on TV on channels like HBO and AMC. Writers now have great leeway about the sort of plots they can do, can write long-term plots (there's only so much character development and plot you can fit into a 2-hour movie), and don't have quite the "must have a $50m+ opening weekend" expectations that big studios put on major motion pictures.
It's basically a replacement for the old "5-man group quests" that used to exist out in the world. They tend to be a bit more plot-focused than 5-man dungeons, they're sortof a step in between regular single-player questing and 5-man dungeons.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice job, Hollywood. You just elevated TPB in the eyes of the general public and made yourselves look like even bigger villians than you already did.
I'm not so sure of that, the general public will never hear of this lawsuit. Slashdotters and other tech-site readers will, but they will have been bombarded with movie/copyright stories already.
Ah the Google+ haters. I and millions of others use Google+ every day. We just use it for things other than whining about stupid shit and complaining about High School like what you find on Facebook. Unlike Facebook I find Google+ to actually be useful. Hate all you want, bitch about how Grandma and little Tina in 10th grade aren't using it. I really don't give a fuck. I'm just glad you and the other whining bitches aren't on it. Thanks for staying away.
"millions" of users? If you think anything other a minuscule fraction of Google's "390 million" figure are actually active accounts, then you are either hopelessly naive, have drunk the kool-aid fanboy-style, or are getting kickbacks from Google.
Worse, I have two separate Google accounts which, for various reasons, I want to keep completely separate. Somehow Google figured out that I wanted to combine them in some sort of single-signon -- I know for sure I would never have done that intentionally. Now my real name is linked with that alternate account, which -sucks-, and I don't know how to decouple them again, or if the damage is already done.
That STD spreads really easily.
Ugh. Skype. Well, it's better than Steam as a chat client, I'll give it that (Steam is terrible), but it pales compared to the other options.
My problem is with 3rd-party integration, especially under Linux. See, I don't want to use the Skype client. I don't want to run a Skype client, an AIM client, a Yahoo client, an IRC client, a... etcetc. I just want one client, that has all my contacts on various networks together with a client I control, logs things in the same format to the same location... etc. Pidgin does this for me. It's fantastic(ish). But unfortunately, skype is not a purely-open protocol, and you still have to run the 'official skype client.' Then, a plugin bridges pidgin and skype. I guess I'd be ok with that, except the skype client is kindof buggy. Sometimes it just hangs entirely, and it'll take awhile before I notice, kill, and restart it. I can't debug it to figure out what it's doing; it's closed source, so who knows. Or sometimes it'll still be working, but it'll silently disconnect from skype, then when I kill the client and reconnect, I get a flood of messages that had been sent that I'd missed. Never had these sorts of problems on other chat networks, and the closed nature is why I'm a bit down on skype compared to open-protocol networks.
A bit like Google groups destroyed Usenet
Eh, I don't think Google Groups destroyed Usenet, newsgroups were well, well on their way out by then. The rise of the web destroyed newsgroups, and the rise of forums on individual websites.
Spam also destroyed just about any non-moderated newsgroup; certainly all the ones that I paid attention to.
I can cut a 2013 teacher some slack for disciplining a student for bitching about homework. But I can't cut anyone slack in 2013 for not knowing "gay" is a generic pejorative. If you don't know gay is a generic pejorative by now, then you also probably missed the memo that it means homosexual. You probably think it means "happy."
Words. They're like tech skills. Keep up or be left behind.
Dude, don't be such a nigger about word definitions.
Oh, you didn't know "nigger" means aggressive and hardcore now? Get with the program, words change meaning all the time.
Try being a politician, it seems to have worked for Bloomberg. Funny he didn't offer it as an alternative.
That's like telling someone they should be a professional athlete. Millions will try, but a bare handful will succeed, everyone else will their time.
And "Spock's Brain."
'nuff said.
Every Star Trek series has had its moments of sheer mediocrity where the wrong people were clearly in charge, and they made lighter and fluffier decisions. For the original TV series, the first two years were decent, but in the third year the studio brought in the producer from Lost in Space and he really changed the feel of the show. Spock's Brain was his first episode.
For the next gen, you had horrible writers in the first two seasons (Maurice Hurley in particular) and a bit too heavy-handed control from Roddenberry. In the third season, he steps back a bit, Hurley is fired, and Ronald D. Moore and Michael Pillar join the show. Noticeable increase in quality. Too late to save the character of Wesley Crusher, though.
Really? What ideas were tested in this magical cauldron of Trek-ness? I keep hearing this claim that Trek was some sort of idea factory, in much the same way that I keep hearing about "hurr durr lens flare." I'd wager that, just like most of the people whining about lens flare only noticed it after they read somebody else's opinion about the lens flare in the film, most of the people carping endlessly about the "big ideas" of the original Trek series are simply doing so because somebody else said that there were big ideas in it.
It's not too hard to see these ideas in play. I'd say a valid criticism of Star Trek was that it was usually fairly unsubtle about it and tried to hit you over the head with their point in case slower members of the audience weren't getting it.
Red Matter was fairly silly. The new movie has its flaws, but at least it doesn't have anything as silly as red matter!
Spock and Uhura was implied, though never outright shown, in the original series. Besides, this is an alternate timeline. Frankly, the main continuity is a mess, and it's entirely mined out. No more, please.
No new series please, not for awhile. I'm still trying to get the bad taste of the last two shitty Trek TV series out of my mouth.
Ah, the old "I'm so reasonable that people who disagree with me must be getting paid to do so" argument.
Pretend property rights are not
Most people involved in IP don't consider them "pretend" property. They consider them special cases of actual property. Property rights that are extremely easy to infringe on, perhaps in some cases impossible not to infringe on them.
Music doesn't make copies of itself if let alone. Life does. Plant a few of these in a field (maybe near natural soybeans), leave them alone for a few years, and you might have a lot more of them. Actively cultivate them and you can multiply them exponentially. If Monsanto wanted to be the sole seller of these beans, they should never sell them until gathered and sterilized via gamma radiation. Selling them as seed is inviting someone to do exactly what this farmer did.
Let those seeds sit on a shelf and they won't do much. Certainly not enough to get anyone into legal trouble.
But we don't need to get into theoreticals. The farmer did the work of planting and cultivating the seeds. The growth of the crops wasn't accidental.
I think the combination of a lot of those numbers comes from several servers that has basically died, and people simply giving up instead of transferring. Fix your broken servers Blizzard, you have too many.
They don't need to consolidate servers really, as now the zones themselves are cross-server. You'll find yourself running into other people from other servers all the time now. In fact, this is the first time I've seen low-level zones actively quested in since the game was released.
As a healer in Vanilla. Sorry. Healing was never complex. If anything it's more complex now than it was back when healers had 2-3 healing spells, 1 HoT and 1 cleansing spell.
Yeah, but you could downrank heals back then to through heals on more targets without going out of mana.
That sounded interesting, though I wasn't a healer back then.
I was glad that when I got to 58 that I could switch to BC as there might be mobs that I don't two hit but that didn't last long
This is the one reason why I hope that Outland never gets redesigned the same way the earlier zones were. There's still some pve challenge there, and if you're undergeared, the level 70-90 zones can be quite challenging.. you're not one or two-shotting everything because your gear is 20 levels behind. That might be the best way to do it.
it's not really the game that has changed, it's you.
*cue dramatic music*
Actually it was the game. The lower levels were completely redesigned for Cataclysm, and much of the exploration and all the challenge was removed.
You may try looking at the forums on the Blizzard website for your realm, as many guilds post recruitment letters there (it's one of the few places I go when I try recruiting for my guild). Even if not, if you post "hey, I'm looking for a guild.." there, you're sure to get some interest unless that particular realm is really dead.
(And hey, if you're the Remus Shepherd I remember from early '90s Usenet newsgroups, I'd certainly welcome you!)
They tried that and got qqed to death the troll heroics that were actually fun were not push over rofl stomp.
Are you talking about the resigned Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub 5-mans that were launched mid-Cataclysm? I think the qqing started earlier, 5-man heroics were about the same difficulty at the start of the expansion, and all the people who got used to the faceroll ease of Wrath 5-mans complained. I found it refreshing. I really liked it, and I was disappointed when the last round of 5-mans for Cataclysm were pathetically easy (and were in Mists as well).
I particularly like DDO for the ubiquitous voice (all groups/raids have voice, no need for teamspeak or anything) so that you can explain stuff on the mic as you play. Sadly, DDO is suffering from low server populations these days, and pugs can barely be found in the first place, but one can hope that more of the new MMOs add voice by default.
That seems to be the last thing I would want.
Reading raid chat can be bad enough, the last thing I want to hear is some teenager screaming into the microphone because someone made a mistake and we wiped.
Or someone's musical selection.
Or someone farting into the microphone.
Ubiquitous voice chat sucks. >_>
I also had no problem with Wine. Granted, I had to figure out how to install it in Wine (hint: do NOT use game DVDs, use the downloadable installer), and remember to disable ActiveX in favor of OpenGL, but other than that, it was gravy. In fact, WoW is one of the most compatible major Windows programs to use with Wine.
The DVDs tended to work better (well faster on my slow DSL) for me... once I had turned off the mount option that honors the 'hidden' flag.
For everyone who has tried and reported it.
No.. no, not really.
First of all, DirectX is -extremely- difficult to get working under Wine with Wow. Part of this is because Wow can use both DirectX and OpenGL, so everyone uses OpenGL under Linux, and DirectX development and bugfixes get short shrift. The problem is that there has been no in-game development of OpenGL for years now, so none of the graphical improvements that were added in the four years or so will work -- no smart shadows, no improved water effects, no sunshafts.
WoW has always been a struggle against wine and cedega. "Hmmm, why does my FPS drop to 10 in raids? What feature can I turn off to bump the FPS? Why am I getting half the framerate I should be getting? Oh god, wine uses 2GB of virtual memory now, if I don't kill my web browser my computer will swap to a halt."
What's worse is that towards the end of Cataclysm, it became been almost impossible to get the new multi-threaded update downloader to work right (it just causes wine to crash). I know it hadn't been fixed by the time MoP came around, so if you were Linux-only you had no way of playing the game. From what I'd heard, most wine-wow players updated on a Windows host and then copied the files over. As a Linux player it was pretty common that you couldn't play on patch day without some tweaking (perhaps installing the newest, newest version of wine), but this took it to another level.
I would say "normal mode" raid encounters can be quite challenging, depending on how far along you are.
I think that Wrath killed WoW (even though I'm still playing as much as I ever have, as are my friends). When it was introduced, Naxx10 was... dead simple. Extremely easy, tuned for beginner players. Raid finder today is the same way, but I sortof expect that. Regular 10/25 instances are still challenging, and heroic mode 10/25 instances are just as challenging as old-school raids. Wrath, however, set an expectation -- 5-mans should be -extremely- easy, raids should be a cakewalk. I think it gave everyone the wrong expectation, and when Cataclysm raids came out, there was such an outcry over how "difficult" they were. Same with the 5-man instances that came with Cataclysm -- they were roughly on par with vanilla's 5-man instances.
Awhile ago I attended a talk given by Alexander Payne (writer/director of Sideways, The Descendants, About Schmidt, Election). He felt that these days, the best writing in entertainment is happening on TV on channels like HBO and AMC. Writers now have great leeway about the sort of plots they can do, can write long-term plots (there's only so much character development and plot you can fit into a 2-hour movie), and don't have quite the "must have a $50m+ opening weekend" expectations that big studios put on major motion pictures.
Where exactly is the point?
It's basically a replacement for the old "5-man group quests" that used to exist out in the world. They tend to be a bit more plot-focused than 5-man dungeons, they're sortof a step in between regular single-player questing and 5-man dungeons.