# Hacker (computer security), someone involved in computer security
That's pretty vague -- the actual language used (assumed it hasn't changed in the last day) is "People committed to circumvention of computer security" listing black hats, grey hats, white hats.
Word meaning changes over time though. If the majority of society decides hacker means computer criminal.. then that is what the word means. Efforts at 'education' make computer geeks just look more out of touch, and the suggested alternative of 'cracker' that many give just sounds stupid.
It's strange, bisexuality is still something that a lot of people in our culture just cannot get their heads around.. they just can't understand it.
Like them or not, most people sort of "get" homosexuals now. But bisexuality still befuddles them, and the idea that someone actually could be bisexual rarely crosses their mind in debates about homosexuality.
I think the only way homosexuality would be a true flaw at the moment would be if the human race was dying out and homosexuals would thus be evolutionary black holes, taking up resources yet not propagating the species. We've long since moved away from that situation though, and face exactly the opposite in many first-world countries. Population is no longer a problem, and homosexuality becomes one more of those harmless biological quirks of modern society.
In our species, sexuality has long been decoupled from procreation.
Yes, gays have been mistreated and ridiculed, beat and spat on. Still though, is the road to acceptance paved with pink man-strings, over-the-top genderized personalities, celebrations of ones (logically speaking) flawed dna and throwing the fact that you are different in everyone's faces? Really?
Meh. When you look at one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence dressed up in a nun's costume riding around on a float, you can easily say "ok. That guy is clearly gay." Same for a hairy guy in bondage gear walking in front of it. But if I happened to be standing at the street corner? Not so much. I blend into the crowd. I look like any other person. The majority of gay people do. Most of us have little interest or love for Judy Garland, Ru-Paul, over-the-top personalities, or other self-aggrandized shows. Just a minority; however, as usual in our culture, it is the flamboyant few whom the media, and indeed even just people in general, focus on. I don't think that's what it means to be gay. In a pride parade, are the pictures run of the group of people dressed as businessmen, walking down the street with their briefcases? No. The pictures you will see are the aforementioned sisters, a Village People tribute band, and so forth. (Then again, I consider pride parades to be detrimental and self-defeating anyway)
Now reverse the situation, see what happens if I refer to a black guy as black. It doesn't matter how politically correct I try to be, it doesn't matter that in a room full of white people his skin color is his most easily identifiable visible feature. He might be a cool guy, but most likely I will get a fist to the face, repeatedly.
... Where the hell do you live where calling a black man black gets you repeatedly punched in the face?? Even here in California that sort of thing would be unheard of.
Oh. I'm scared. Perhaps you'll explain, first, why you are coming for me. Because I'm an asshole, and you disagree with me? Talk about petty......
Because once you decide you are the law and the executioner, you get to live in a society where others can decide the same. And they might find your... eagerness, and your activities, if you followed your earlier suggestions, to be somewhat disturbing, and may indeed find you to be beyond rehabilitation. At that point, the only solution, by your code, would be to put you down.
Seems a lot of people here want someone who is alive to be at fault here. That way we can blame someone living and go after them. That the person responsible might be dead feels inadequate. We want someone living to blame, dammit!
The problem is, the person truly responsible for Lori Drew's death is Lori Drew herself. No one shot her in a dark alley, nor did her parents push her in front of a train. Teenager or not, harassment or not, she made the conscious decision.
If you hang a noose in front of the house of a black person, and it hurts their feelings, should you be charged and go to prison?
I think a much better question is, "Why are you (and lots of others, apparently) so interested in getting away with being a mean-spirited shit to people most likely to suffer real emotional hurt from it under the guise of 'freedom of speech'?"
Whatever happened to the notion that others' feelings ought to matter to us as much as our own?
There is a difference between "being a mean-spirited asshole that no one likes" and "being a mean-spirited asshole who goes to jail for it." Yeah, sorry, but being a mean asshole should not be a jailable offense. It should be enough that they're ostracised from society.
Mac/PC interoperability seems far more common than cross-console play. World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Unreal Tournament, Diablo, etc.. you have no idea what the operating systems of the people on the other side are, and that's the way it should be.
Why not? Every single troll instance we've been in have involved trolls invoking the gods to empower them to change animal forms.. ZA, ZG, etc were full of that sort of thing. Druidic powers have never meant that the druid must be a worshipper of Elune or the Earthmother. There are all sorts of ways this could be done without any lore-twisting.
I love the thousands of people cheering on the ads that they paid hundreds of dollars to get to BlizzCon to see.
It's stuff like that that confirms my faith in the intelligence of humanity.
Hey, I had a blast while I was there. Chatted about my favorite games, hung out with guildies who came from around the country, went to an Ozzy show, played advance copies of fun games, went to art panels, and then went to Disneyland across the street.
But oh yeah, that's all corporate and thus stupid, right?
A lot of games with 'high end' graphics like Crysis or Age of Conan for example, have APPALLING color depth. These games really may as well be using 16 bit color.
16-bit? I was thinking more like 4-bit. As David Wong put it, Call of Duty has four colors: brown, grey, black, and muzzle-flash.
Not to mention that if the Trial of the Grand Crusader gear is any indication, we're already in the middle of the most ridiculous gear inflation in the history of WoW. "Valorous" T8 to "Heroic" T9 gear is a bigger gap than even T4 -> Sunwell gear.
Just to nitpick, the T4 gear ranged from ilvl 115 to 125, while Sunwell gear was ilvl 159-164, a gap of 34-45. Valorous T8 gloves are ilvl 219, while the top hard-mode T9 is 258 a gap of.. 39. So actually you're pretty close now. I don't know if it's fair to compare hard-modes to regular gear though. The regular 25-man T9 is ilvl 245.
While the above poster is incorrect that there are no new spells, they went over in the game systems panel that the talent trees will not be extended this time. Your end-tree 51-point talents now will continue to be your end-tree 51-point talents in the expansion. They did say they want to add new talents in the thick of the trees to make them more interesting, and almost all of the old +stat talents are being removed.. that is the talents that were no fun to have (like +5% crit, +5% hit, etc) that people felt that they HAD to take. The first tier Fury warrior talent cruelty is going away, because it's boring and every warrior HAS to take it -- there are almost no builds that don't have it.
Instead, every talent tree will have a passive bonus granted to the character depending on how many talents are taken in that tree. A rogue with lots of talents in assassination would get a passive bonus to poison damage (just an example) while combat might have a flat damage increase or an increase in crit or hit.
I wouldn't say it runs flawlessly! I've been getting lots of client crashes since WoW patch 3.2 came out.. at least once per Yogg-Saron night. The Yogg fight in particular kills my framerate... down to 8 fps while it hovers closer to 80 in Dalaran and 100+ in the wilderness. I have been causing wipes on Yogg because once a night during phase 1 wine will thrash, give up, and print out a giant stack trace, and a cloud would hit me as I try to get back in. I need to try downloading the latest version again...
Then there are the missing features, such as DirectX support and the fancy shadows and better water effects that come from the DirectX version.
I then interpret this as if people playing with wine would switch to Linux, we would have only the expense to realize a new version of WoW, *next game*.
Unfortunately there are ongoing costs associated with developing a game client; it's not a one-time expense. I've talked with Linux advocates who think that it would be rather cheap to create and maintain a native Linux client, but I don't really buy that..
So is he paradoxically suggesting that to show how many people play with wine, and to ask Blizzard to create a Linux version, all those people should leave WoW until a Linux native client is released?
I think he's asking "would the people using the linux client be totally new subscribers or would they be people who used wine to play before?" Basically, reading between the lines, he's wondering if they can get away with having Linux users use wine, and at the moment, that seems to be the case.
Back when Blizzard's Warden program misidentified a bunch of cedega users as hackers, there was a fair amount of frank talk from cedega maintainers and blue posters (reps from Blizzard who post on the official forums) about cedega/wine and wow. Blizzard posters mentioned they would be tracking the use of wine/cedega (since it's possible to do so, though some douchbaggery from Microsoft made the wine maintainers put in some features that make it harder for programs to detect if they're running in wine). Also, cedega devs mentioned that they are in contact with Blizzard developers to ensure that cedega will run wow. Unfortunately, cedega has fallen by the wayside as their codebase atrophied, customer support became inadequate, and wine overtook it in compatibility and bugfixes, so I'm not sure what the status of all that is now.
Couldn't Blizzard realise a poll on their website/whatever, only for subscribed, asking if they would play on Linux if a native client was there?
They've done that before -- I remember filling out such a poll a few years ago. I don't really remember if it was for World of Warcraft, but it was a Blizzard game, at least.
I think they fear 5~10% of players would answer yes, thus forcing them to release a Linux client.
I don't think they would. At least, I have no plans to stop playing.
Pretty smokey answers...Why don't they just say: no, we won't because wine works 100% and we do want to profit from that? or Yes, we're now counting you (Linux users) guys and we'll see what happens??
I don't think it's a dodgy answer at all.. in fact, he's pretty candid: "We have to consider how many people aren't playing WoW right now and would if we had a Linux client. Or is it people who play already and just want support in their preferred operating system? If we decided to support a new platform, we would have to figure out how many game features we had to give up development on in order to develop a new client."
What that means is he's pretty sure that the people currently playing WoW with wine would be playing with Windows if that was the only possibility (or at least a large portion would be). Really, you have to think about the costs of creating and supporting a Linux client. They're not insubstantial. Then, how much additional revenue would such a client bring in? How many -new users- would it bring in? If people just move from playing under wine to playing under the native windows client, it's a bit of a win for Blizzard, but only a small one.
Ok, I wish I could say this slowly so maybe you could understand...but read this next part a few times. Bnetd was created to bypass Blizzard's cd key check so people could play pirated versions of Starcraft online.
That is bullshit, and you are being either obtuse or intellectually dishonest here. Maybe the game you were thinking of here was Warcraft III, where some people DID fork bnetd to create another project which would run WCIII without CD checks, which regular bnetd did not do.
Maybe you don't realize just how shitty battle.net was when bnetd was developed. It was very laggy, and flat-out down quite often -- I have vivid memories of being unable to use it most of the nights I tried to play with friends. Back then you had two options -- IPX over LAN, or battle.net. If battle.net didn't work (a very frequent occurrence) then you were out of luck, unless you tried to set up IPX tunnelling over the Internet, and even then if you had two people in the group with different connection speeds (one guy was on dialup) you were screwed -- the game would stutter once per second, which was pretty much unusable. At that point I downloaded bnetd and used it to host the games instead using the battle.net protocol and everything -just worked-. And nicely, it saved our win/loss record, battle.net style, which the open games did not. Eventually Blizzard added the UDP option, but it had the same problems as the IPX games. And forget having two people behind a NATting firewall trying to play with others outside that network -- battle.net just wasn't designed for that sort of thing. We continued to play games through bnetd until we moved from Starcraft to Diablo II and other games, which, thankfully, used a real TCP/IP host port and didn't require all of that other nonsense.
If bnetd was created just to help pirate Starcraft, would the bnetd authors have contacted Blizzard asking for a way to legally verify the veracity of CD keys? (the answer "we don't want to tell you that", but at least they asked)
Is bnetd at all relevant now? No, it is not. It was really only necessary for Starcraft, as during Battle.Net's dark days it was the only way to play online reliably with friends aside from LAN parties. And the memories of those days are probably why so many people here are annoyed that LAN play is being taken out. I think the new Battle.Net will likely work fine, though.
Battle,net is for matchmaking - the actual game traffic should stay local.
Ugh. I hope not, that's one of the reasons why battle.net play with Starcraft and the first Diablo was so prone to frustration. I've rarely found a game that DOESN'T break in retarded ways with dealing with NAT connections, requiring, at a minimum, poking holes in firewalls. With Starcraft, it broke in that it couldn't handle connections of different speed. Have three people on broadband and one person on dialup? The game slows to dialup speed, causing never-ending 'stuttering' that makes it unplayable. Have a game that likes to open up specific UDP ports? Well, you have to do some firewall port forwarding, which sometimes works. But if you have two machines behind that NAT and want to play with some other people over the Internet as well... well good luck! That takes some wizardry that is just beyond the abilities of your average gamer. And before you say "any gamer sophisticated to set up a NAT..." that happens to be the default configuration of your standard Cable/DSL modem these days.
So battle.net was a huge frustration and source of problems with Starcraft and it was quite unreliable (but better) for Diablo II.
So no thank you. Please send ALL traffic through the central server. It manages the network properly (since in that case, the clients don't need to accept -any- incoming connections), and it reduces the options for game cheating (it's impossible to find a non-hacked game with non-hacked items on local/open battle.net Diablo 2) and hacking. I have no problem with the implementation of battle.net in World of Warcraft (where I spend most of my game time these days), so if the new Starcraft II battle.net is as reliable as wow's implementation, I'll be satisfied.
Nope, not extortion. It's offering something you don't have to in exchange for something positive from them. That's called compromising or in the worst case, plea bargaining.
This Futarama crap is crap. The Simpsons is what should come back. Phil Hartman especially. He must be holding out for 10 million at least. Also, I like The Who to continue to make guest appearences from time to time.
I'd love it if the Simpsons from the 80s and early 90s returned.
Unfortunately all we get are the Simpsons from the late 90s and 2000s.
Slashdot Mirror
# Hacker (computer security), someone involved in computer security
That's pretty vague -- the actual language used (assumed it hasn't changed in the last day) is "People committed to circumvention of computer security" listing black hats, grey hats, white hats.
Word meaning changes over time though. If the majority of society decides hacker means computer criminal.. then that is what the word means. Efforts at 'education' make computer geeks just look more out of touch, and the suggested alternative of 'cracker' that many give just sounds stupid.
It's strange, bisexuality is still something that a lot of people in our culture just cannot get their heads around.. they just can't understand it.
Like them or not, most people sort of "get" homosexuals now. But bisexuality still befuddles them, and the idea that someone actually could be bisexual rarely crosses their mind in debates about homosexuality.
I think the only way homosexuality would be a true flaw at the moment would be if the human race was dying out and homosexuals would thus be evolutionary black holes, taking up resources yet not propagating the species. We've long since moved away from that situation though, and face exactly the opposite in many first-world countries. Population is no longer a problem, and homosexuality becomes one more of those harmless biological quirks of modern society.
In our species, sexuality has long been decoupled from procreation.
Yes, gays have been mistreated and ridiculed, beat and spat on. Still though, is the road to acceptance paved with pink man-strings, over-the-top genderized personalities, celebrations of ones (logically speaking) flawed dna and throwing the fact that you are different in everyone's faces? Really?
Meh. When you look at one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence dressed up in a nun's costume riding around on a float, you can easily say "ok. That guy is clearly gay." Same for a hairy guy in bondage gear walking in front of it. But if I happened to be standing at the street corner? Not so much. I blend into the crowd. I look like any other person. The majority of gay people do. Most of us have little interest or love for Judy Garland, Ru-Paul, over-the-top personalities, or other self-aggrandized shows. Just a minority; however, as usual in our culture, it is the flamboyant few whom the media, and indeed even just people in general, focus on. I don't think that's what it means to be gay. In a pride parade, are the pictures run of the group of people dressed as businessmen, walking down the street with their briefcases? No. The pictures you will see are the aforementioned sisters, a Village People tribute band, and so forth. (Then again, I consider pride parades to be detrimental and self-defeating anyway)
Now reverse the situation, see what happens if I refer to a black guy as black. It doesn't matter how politically correct I try to be, it doesn't matter that in a room full of white people his skin color is his most easily identifiable visible feature. He might be a cool guy, but most likely I will get a fist to the face, repeatedly.
Thank you, AC, for contributing nothing of value to this conversation.
Oh. I'm scared. Perhaps you'll explain, first, why you are coming for me. Because I'm an asshole, and you disagree with me? Talk about petty......
Because once you decide you are the law and the executioner, you get to live in a society where others can decide the same. And they might find your... eagerness, and your activities, if you followed your earlier suggestions, to be somewhat disturbing, and may indeed find you to be beyond rehabilitation. At that point, the only solution, by your code, would be to put you down.
Seems a lot of people here want someone who is alive to be at fault here. That way we can blame someone living and go after them. That the person responsible might be dead feels inadequate. We want someone living to blame, dammit!
The problem is, the person truly responsible for Lori Drew's death is Lori Drew herself. No one shot her in a dark alley, nor did her parents push her in front of a train. Teenager or not, harassment or not, she made the conscious decision.
If you hang a noose in front of the house of a black person, and it hurts their feelings, should you be charged and go to prison?
I think a much better question is, "Why are you (and lots of others, apparently) so interested in getting away with being a mean-spirited shit to people most likely to suffer real emotional hurt from it under the guise of 'freedom of speech'?"
Whatever happened to the notion that others' feelings ought to matter to us as much as our own?
There is a difference between "being a mean-spirited asshole that no one likes" and "being a mean-spirited asshole who goes to jail for it." Yeah, sorry, but being a mean asshole should not be a jailable offense. It should be enough that they're ostracised from society.
Mac/PC interoperability seems far more common than cross-console play. World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Unreal Tournament, Diablo, etc.. you have no idea what the operating systems of the people on the other side are, and that's the way it should be.
Does the total (original game + TBC + WotLK + Cataclysm) cost more than $50? If so, it's too fucking expensive!
By what metric? You'll get far far more to do, far more content, especially for new players, than any other game you could get at that price range.
Why not? Every single troll instance we've been in have involved trolls invoking the gods to empower them to change animal forms.. ZA, ZG, etc were full of that sort of thing. Druidic powers have never meant that the druid must be a worshipper of Elune or the Earthmother. There are all sorts of ways this could be done without any lore-twisting.
Oh and for you "PvP" griefers who like to gank n00bs, expect the starting zones to be no fly areas like Wintergrasp. My prediction.
And Wintergrasp is no longer a no-fly area. :) You can fly over it, but once you land and start fighting, you can't mount up again.
I love the thousands of people cheering on the ads that they paid hundreds of dollars to get to BlizzCon to see.
It's stuff like that that confirms my faith in the intelligence of humanity.
Hey, I had a blast while I was there. Chatted about my favorite games, hung out with guildies who came from around the country, went to an Ozzy show, played advance copies of fun games, went to art panels, and then went to Disneyland across the street.
But oh yeah, that's all corporate and thus stupid, right?
Whew, have you been to Desolace? Talk about a zone that's currently broken. :( I'm looking forward to the new, lush, tropical Desolace!
A join? Since when do you smoke SQL?
This would really explain some of the database designs and interfaces I've seen.
Be careful what you wish for.
A lot of games with 'high end' graphics like Crysis or Age of Conan for example, have APPALLING color depth. These games really may as well be using 16 bit color.
16-bit? I was thinking more like 4-bit. As David Wong put it, Call of Duty has four colors: brown, grey, black, and muzzle-flash.
Not to mention that if the Trial of the Grand Crusader gear is any indication, we're already in the middle of the most ridiculous gear inflation in the history of WoW. "Valorous" T8 to "Heroic" T9 gear is a bigger gap than even T4 -> Sunwell gear.
Just to nitpick, the T4 gear ranged from ilvl 115 to 125, while Sunwell gear was ilvl 159-164, a gap of 34-45. Valorous T8 gloves are ilvl 219, while the top hard-mode T9 is 258 a gap of.. 39. So actually you're pretty close now. I don't know if it's fair to compare hard-modes to regular gear though. The regular 25-man T9 is ilvl 245.
While the above poster is incorrect that there are no new spells, they went over in the game systems panel that the talent trees will not be extended this time. Your end-tree 51-point talents now will continue to be your end-tree 51-point talents in the expansion. They did say they want to add new talents in the thick of the trees to make them more interesting, and almost all of the old +stat talents are being removed.. that is the talents that were no fun to have (like +5% crit, +5% hit, etc) that people felt that they HAD to take. The first tier Fury warrior talent cruelty is going away, because it's boring and every warrior HAS to take it -- there are almost no builds that don't have it.
Instead, every talent tree will have a passive bonus granted to the character depending on how many talents are taken in that tree. A rogue with lots of talents in assassination would get a passive bonus to poison damage (just an example) while combat might have a flat damage increase or an increase in crit or hit.
I wouldn't say it runs flawlessly! I've been getting lots of client crashes since WoW patch 3.2 came out.. at least once per Yogg-Saron night. The Yogg fight in particular kills my framerate... down to 8 fps while it hovers closer to 80 in Dalaran and 100+ in the wilderness. I have been causing wipes on Yogg because once a night during phase 1 wine will thrash, give up, and print out a giant stack trace, and a cloud would hit me as I try to get back in. I need to try downloading the latest version again...
Then there are the missing features, such as DirectX support and the fancy shadows and better water effects that come from the DirectX version.
I then interpret this as if people playing with wine would switch to Linux, we would have only the expense to realize a new version of WoW, *next game*.
Unfortunately there are ongoing costs associated with developing a game client; it's not a one-time expense. I've talked with Linux advocates who think that it would be rather cheap to create and maintain a native Linux client, but I don't really buy that..
So is he paradoxically suggesting that to show how many people play with wine, and to ask Blizzard to create a Linux version, all those people should leave WoW until a Linux native client is released?
I think he's asking "would the people using the linux client be totally new subscribers or would they be people who used wine to play before?" Basically, reading between the lines, he's wondering if they can get away with having Linux users use wine, and at the moment, that seems to be the case.
Back when Blizzard's Warden program misidentified a bunch of cedega users as hackers, there was a fair amount of frank talk from cedega maintainers and blue posters (reps from Blizzard who post on the official forums) about cedega/wine and wow. Blizzard posters mentioned they would be tracking the use of wine/cedega (since it's possible to do so, though some douchbaggery from Microsoft made the wine maintainers put in some features that make it harder for programs to detect if they're running in wine). Also, cedega devs mentioned that they are in contact with Blizzard developers to ensure that cedega will run wow. Unfortunately, cedega has fallen by the wayside as their codebase atrophied, customer support became inadequate, and wine overtook it in compatibility and bugfixes, so I'm not sure what the status of all that is now.
Couldn't Blizzard realise a poll on their website/whatever, only for subscribed, asking if they would play on Linux if a native client was there?
They've done that before -- I remember filling out such a poll a few years ago. I don't really remember if it was for World of Warcraft, but it was a Blizzard game, at least.
I think they fear 5~10% of players would answer yes, thus forcing them to release a Linux client.
I don't think they would. At least, I have no plans to stop playing.
Pretty smokey answers...Why don't they just say: no, we won't because wine works 100% and we do want to profit from that? or Yes, we're now counting you (Linux users) guys and we'll see what happens??
I don't think it's a dodgy answer at all.. in fact, he's pretty candid: "We have to consider how many people aren't playing WoW right now and would if we had a Linux client. Or is it people who play already and just want support in their preferred operating system? If we decided to support a new platform, we would have to figure out how many game features we had to give up development on in order to develop a new client."
What that means is he's pretty sure that the people currently playing WoW with wine would be playing with Windows if that was the only possibility (or at least a large portion would be). Really, you have to think about the costs of creating and supporting a Linux client. They're not insubstantial. Then, how much additional revenue would such a client bring in? How many -new users- would it bring in? If people just move from playing under wine to playing under the native windows client, it's a bit of a win for Blizzard, but only a small one.
Ok, I wish I could say this slowly so maybe you could understand...but read this next part a few times. Bnetd was created to bypass Blizzard's cd key check so people could play pirated versions of Starcraft online.
That is bullshit, and you are being either obtuse or intellectually dishonest here. Maybe the game you were thinking of here was Warcraft III, where some people DID fork bnetd to create another project which would run WCIII without CD checks, which regular bnetd did not do.
Maybe you don't realize just how shitty battle.net was when bnetd was developed. It was very laggy, and flat-out down quite often -- I have vivid memories of being unable to use it most of the nights I tried to play with friends. Back then you had two options -- IPX over LAN, or battle.net. If battle.net didn't work (a very frequent occurrence) then you were out of luck, unless you tried to set up IPX tunnelling over the Internet, and even then if you had two people in the group with different connection speeds (one guy was on dialup) you were screwed -- the game would stutter once per second, which was pretty much unusable. At that point I downloaded bnetd and used it to host the games instead using the battle.net protocol and everything -just worked-. And nicely, it saved our win/loss record, battle.net style, which the open games did not. Eventually Blizzard added the UDP option, but it had the same problems as the IPX games. And forget having two people behind a NATting firewall trying to play with others outside that network -- battle.net just wasn't designed for that sort of thing. We continued to play games through bnetd until we moved from Starcraft to Diablo II and other games, which, thankfully, used a real TCP/IP host port and didn't require all of that other nonsense.
If bnetd was created just to help pirate Starcraft, would the bnetd authors have contacted Blizzard asking for a way to legally verify the veracity of CD keys? (the answer "we don't want to tell you that", but at least they asked)
Is bnetd at all relevant now? No, it is not. It was really only necessary for Starcraft, as during Battle.Net's dark days it was the only way to play online reliably with friends aside from LAN parties. And the memories of those days are probably why so many people here are annoyed that LAN play is being taken out. I think the new Battle.Net will likely work fine, though.
"Major lan party?"
Maybe some 30-somethings reliving their college years still do that, but for the most part that sort of thing has died out.
Battle,net is for matchmaking - the actual game traffic should stay local.
Ugh. I hope not, that's one of the reasons why battle.net play with Starcraft and the first Diablo was so prone to frustration. I've rarely found a game that DOESN'T break in retarded ways with dealing with NAT connections, requiring, at a minimum, poking holes in firewalls. With Starcraft, it broke in that it couldn't handle connections of different speed. Have three people on broadband and one person on dialup? The game slows to dialup speed, causing never-ending 'stuttering' that makes it unplayable. Have a game that likes to open up specific UDP ports? Well, you have to do some firewall port forwarding, which sometimes works. But if you have two machines behind that NAT and want to play with some other people over the Internet as well... well good luck! That takes some wizardry that is just beyond the abilities of your average gamer. And before you say "any gamer sophisticated to set up a NAT..." that happens to be the default configuration of your standard Cable/DSL modem these days.
So battle.net was a huge frustration and source of problems with Starcraft and it was quite unreliable (but better) for Diablo II.
So no thank you. Please send ALL traffic through the central server. It manages the network properly (since in that case, the clients don't need to accept -any- incoming connections), and it reduces the options for game cheating (it's impossible to find a non-hacked game with non-hacked items on local/open battle.net Diablo 2) and hacking. I have no problem with the implementation of battle.net in World of Warcraft (where I spend most of my game time these days), so if the new Starcraft II battle.net is as reliable as wow's implementation, I'll be satisfied.
Nope, not extortion. It's offering something you don't have to in exchange for something positive from them. That's called compromising or in the worst case, plea bargaining.
This Futarama crap is crap. The Simpsons is what should come back. Phil Hartman especially. He must be holding out for 10 million at least. Also, I like The Who to continue to make guest appearences from time to time.
I'd love it if the Simpsons from the 80s and early 90s returned.
Unfortunately all we get are the Simpsons from the late 90s and 2000s.