First of all, I think it is a mistake to focus primarily on one issue while letting other important, if not quite as important, issues slide. While the War in the Iraq is an important issue, it doesn't mean we should stop talking about other problems as they come up or ideas of how to improve society, better the future, etc.
While "a bill requiring the notification of authorities when you get illegal stuff in your cache isn't going to affect the way people think" is true, I think most of the annoyance is over other sections of the bill. For example, requiring operators to keep copies of illegal images and send them in to the required agencies is in itself illegal -- mere possession of child porn images is criminal no matter what your justification, enough to get you registered as a sex offender, something that there is little recourse to fix. While the bill is very generous in providing immunity for the staff of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, it offers no such protections for wi-fi administrators. It also expands and redefines what constitutes an illegal image, including classifications that were struck down by the Supreme Court. So I would say yes, there's still quite a bit that's wrong about the bill that's worth getting a bit hot under the collar about.
The bill requires Starbucks to spy on you as you use their hot spot.
Where do you see that? No, seriously, a lot of people are under the impression that this bill mandates monitoring, but I haven't seen anything in the bill that would do that yet.
So what your really trying to say is that France was the socially awkward girl in school, the one that no really liked, but one or two guys. America is the pretty pretty cheerleader who is dumb and have no clue what is going out side of her own little world, till one day the bad Butch girl starts pushing her around. So America decides she's going to tell the principal that Butch girl has drugs in her locker. The whole time France is tell the principal that it's not true. In the end France was right but America needs to save face so she writes whore all over France's locker? Did I get it right?
...
That's far better than most analogies posted on Slashdot.
Also, public humiliation is no longer considered a valid form of
punishment in this country. It hasn't been for a long time. We're a
long way from Salem.
Besides, public humiliation really only works when the public is disgusted by the crime committed. They can rally against that. But when the accused is guilty of losing a receipt? Or is accused of a crime committed by the informant who collects the reward? It's a bit tougher to get public distaste built from that, no matter how you try to spin the accused as "thieves."
Why does WOW not have large level loads? Because the game uses very little memory. The minimum sysreqs are a Pentium 3 800, with a 32mb vram ap.
Unfortunately, Blizzard has a history of releasing ridiculously-low system requirements on their games, requirements that, if you used a system such as that, would yield an almost-unplayable game experience. I'm not even talking about minimum vs recommended requirements. The "minimum" requirements were unrealistically-low for Diablo II, and they're bad for WoW as well.
It's the lowest common denominator... and consequently, using such little vram, it looks like dog shit compared to a modern FPS.
Actually the game looks far better than most "graphically more advanced" FPSes, mostly because art direction was actually a high priority when designing a game.
One might expect, or even hope, that people subject to oppressive regimes might flee abroad to escape to a better life, not to perpetuate the misery.
Unfortunately, often not the case. Our most famous example, the Puritans who settled New England, wished to perpetuate an oppressive regime, except they wished to be the oppressors, not the oppressed for once. Whether they left Europe because they were oppressed, or whether they were essentially kicked out because no one could stand them is a matter for debate.
If you bothered learning something about how the state subsidizes the arts in the EU, they often give out funds without any specific stipulations on how it is spent.
Yeah, seriously, that would NOT fly here. For many, many reasons.
Some people are stupid. They think "Oh! It's called PATRIOT, so anyone who thinks it's a bad idea is obviously not a patriot!"
It's not really that sort of a rational decision, it's more that words like Patriot work on a subconscious level. They may not support it simply because it's titled that, but it does give you sortof a warm fuzzy feeling. And, of course, it aligns your side with the forces of light.
Absolutely, positively not. You're falling into the trap that the Anti-Defamation League has been working so hard to promote -- that disapproving of Israel or it's policies is somehow anti-semetic. After all, it's harder to criticize some easily-criticizable political policies when some race-baiter is ready to pull out the old racism card.
First, I'm not slamming him for being associated with "progressives". I'm saying that "progressivism" itself is evil.
Well by that token Fred Phelps and his "God Hates Fags" protesters are the face of the conservative movement. Casting the most radical of any faction as the norm is an easy way to dismiss any political movement.
Oh, it looks like someone is tired of losing court cases due to the fact that they don't have ANY proof. It's a good thing they can afford their own senators.
I'm not at all a fan of the RIAA and MPAA, but I'll play Devil's Advocate here. This is all coming about because file sharers would get caught sharing movies and songs, but then turn around and say "Well, you can't really prove it was actually -me- sitting at the keyboard of my computer. Teehee."
If you thought that illegal activity wasn't going to be prosecuted because it was difficult to determine which computer behind a NAT did the sharing, this should come as a wake-up call.
lolwell is debatable but can be used right with good raid discipline (drop a lolwell for dpsers to grab as needed, especially warlocks. frees up your GCD's to be spent on the tank.)
Yeah, my BF is a lightwell-specced priest (well, until next patch) and, although it seemed so useless at first, we just.. kept finding good uses for it. Say, in Gruul, where we had to drop raid healing after a certain number of growths and focus on the tanks -- lightwell was down to top off those who took a cave-in. Same for Void Reaver (using it during VR required some timing though). It's great for any situation, in fact, when the healers are strained enough that they can't top off the raid but have to focus instead on the tanks.
Circle of Healing, which I've still not seen anyone spec for, sounds like it could be incredible in a number of fights. That number being.. sadly.. small. I don't know what you'd have to give up to get it though. When my guild was learning Void Reaver, various guides mentioned that CoH was incredibly good at healing the melee taking the pounding. I've still never seen it used in practice, and now I'm curious. It's instant-cast nature sounds great (on paper, again), though it requires people in that group be pretty-closely clustered (within a 15-yard-radius circle), a behavior the game tends to penalize in many fights.
D'oh! You're right, I've never even seen a priest take Circle of Healing.
I remember someone did a sweep of several thousand random armory profiles of level 70 characters and did a breakdown of percentages of builds, and of those builds, what percentages took the 31-point and 41-point talents. Pretty interesting.
So wear a bandage around your head instead. When asked (who'd ask?) tell them you have severe head tramua and would they like to see the pussey scabs. Use a good bandage with some mucous stains for effect. Dosen't matter that ski masks are/might be illegal bandages are not. Same effect though.
Yup. It has little to do with the actual functionality of what you are wearing and more to do with peoples' perceptions of you. The perception of the man in a ski mask (unless, as another poster pointed out, there's an actual blizzard outside) is that a robbery is imminent. While you may not go to jail or have criminal charges leveled against you, you'll likely have to spend some time explaining to the police what's going on.
Not really. Trunks have locks, and require keys to open them. Reading encrypted packets also requires keys. Granted, 256 bit encryption is probably a bit more secure than the average trunk.
Most Security through Obscurity schemes have some sort of minimal protection besides just knowing about it. If there are real valuables in the trunk, it's not tough for a determined thief to get in there. Most of the time there's not enough there to make the effort worth it. But if a thief knew that your newly-purchased computer or other valuables were being stored there?
I don't think they'll care. I hear their commercials all the time on the radio and they're constantly talking about how fast their downloads are. That usually seems to be an ISP's selling point since most people don't care about upload bandwidth.
Here's an experiment. Walk into your local bank or 7-11 or whatnot wearing a ski mask.
You might be doubtful, but I have the suspicion that you'll find out ski masks are pretty much banned already in every location but the ski slopes.
Why? Because, except on said ski slopes, under normal circumstances the only time people wear ski masks is to rob.
When a tool is used far more often for illegal purposes than it is for legal purposes then, whether it's fair or even warranted, a very dark cloud of suspicion will fall on those who use that tool.
I'd point to things such as "https" as reasons for legal encryption, as well as the specter of identity theft, cracking, and so forth.
Encrypted peer-to-peer though. How much of that traffic do you think is actually legal? Honestly?
Warriors getting buffed again (no, Mace nerf is not meaningful. Intercept buff is.) so Kalgan can rock his Season 3's.
You may see this as a troll post, but Blizzard has been clear with their actions they're not interested in class balance, only in buffing (making stronger) the classes that the dev's mainly play. For those uninformed, Kalgan is the head designer/game balancer, and his current favorite class is Warrior.
If all this "Kalgan favors warriors" nonsense was actually true, then the arms tree would have had a worthwhile 41-point talent by now. Endless Rage is competing with Lightwell for the honor of "least often taken 41-point talent for someone specced into that tree." Arms warriors didn't get buffed, since because there's no reason to spec more than 31-33 points in arms, pvp warriors will still dump a bunch of points into fury and get everything they want there, just like before. In fact, you could say that the change to disarm mechanics serves as a nerf to the formerly-disarm-immune warrior. Then there are the fury warriors, and the jury is still out on whether the loss of Death Wish will be balanced by the increased threat reduction. I suppose it will depend on the encounter, but the fury warrior won't be able to ramp up his damage as much for Death Wish+Execute to burn out enraged bosses. At least prot will benefit from the expertise change. It's a bit of a nerf to my orc axe racial skill though.
Slashdot Mirror
Another honorable mention, from the period of Redbook audio on CDs: Fantasy General and Heroes of Might and Magic II. Both excellent PC game scores.
First of all, I think it is a mistake to focus primarily on one issue while letting other important, if not quite as important, issues slide. While the War in the Iraq is an important issue, it doesn't mean we should stop talking about other problems as they come up or ideas of how to improve society, better the future, etc.
While "a bill requiring the notification of authorities when you get illegal stuff in your cache isn't going to affect the way people think" is true, I think most of the annoyance is over other sections of the bill. For example, requiring operators to keep copies of illegal images and send them in to the required agencies is in itself illegal -- mere possession of child porn images is criminal no matter what your justification, enough to get you registered as a sex offender, something that there is little recourse to fix. While the bill is very generous in providing immunity for the staff of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, it offers no such protections for wi-fi administrators. It also expands and redefines what constitutes an illegal image, including classifications that were struck down by the Supreme Court. So I would say yes, there's still quite a bit that's wrong about the bill that's worth getting a bit hot under the collar about.
Where do you see that? No, seriously, a lot of people are under the impression that this bill mandates monitoring, but I haven't seen anything in the bill that would do that yet.
In his defense, TFA was terrible and misleading, and you'll get little enlightenment from reading it.
That's far better than most analogies posted on Slashdot.
Take one step.. and then again, come on it's time to go do the Mario!
I knew there was something that could bring Microsoft and Apple fanbois together!
Besides, public humiliation really only works when the public is disgusted by the crime committed. They can rally against that. But when the accused is guilty of losing a receipt? Or is accused of a crime committed by the informant who collects the reward? It's a bit tougher to get public distaste built from that, no matter how you try to spin the accused as "thieves."
Really... do you think you're being clever here?
Unfortunately, Blizzard has a history of releasing ridiculously-low system requirements on their games, requirements that, if you used a system such as that, would yield an almost-unplayable game experience. I'm not even talking about minimum vs recommended requirements. The "minimum" requirements were unrealistically-low for Diablo II, and they're bad for WoW as well.
It's the lowest common denominator... and consequently, using such little vram, it looks like dog shit compared to a modern FPS.
Actually the game looks far better than most "graphically more advanced" FPSes, mostly because art direction was actually a high priority when designing a game.
"More realism" does not make something better.
Unfortunately, often not the case. Our most famous example, the Puritans who settled New England, wished to perpetuate an oppressive regime, except they wished to be the oppressors, not the oppressed for once. Whether they left Europe because they were oppressed, or whether they were essentially kicked out because no one could stand them is a matter for debate.
Yeah, seriously, that would NOT fly here. For many, many reasons.
It's not really that sort of a rational decision, it's more that words like Patriot work on a subconscious level. They may not support it simply because it's titled that, but it does give you sortof a warm fuzzy feeling. And, of course, it aligns your side with the forces of light.
Absolutely, positively not. You're falling into the trap that the Anti-Defamation League has been working so hard to promote -- that disapproving of Israel or it's policies is somehow anti-semetic. After all, it's harder to criticize some easily-criticizable political policies when some race-baiter is ready to pull out the old racism card.
Well by that token Fred Phelps and his "God Hates Fags" protesters are the face of the conservative movement. Casting the most radical of any faction as the norm is an easy way to dismiss any political movement.
I'm not at all a fan of the RIAA and MPAA, but I'll play Devil's Advocate here. This is all coming about because file sharers would get caught sharing movies and songs, but then turn around and say "Well, you can't really prove it was actually -me- sitting at the keyboard of my computer. Teehee."
If you thought that illegal activity wasn't going to be prosecuted because it was difficult to determine which computer behind a NAT did the sharing, this should come as a wake-up call.
Yeah, my BF is a lightwell-specced priest (well, until next patch) and, although it seemed so useless at first, we just.. kept finding good uses for it. Say, in Gruul, where we had to drop raid healing after a certain number of growths and focus on the tanks -- lightwell was down to top off those who took a cave-in. Same for Void Reaver (using it during VR required some timing though). It's great for any situation, in fact, when the healers are strained enough that they can't top off the raid but have to focus instead on the tanks.
Circle of Healing, which I've still not seen anyone spec for, sounds like it could be incredible in a number of fights. That number being.. sadly.. small. I don't know what you'd have to give up to get it though. When my guild was learning Void Reaver, various guides mentioned that CoH was incredibly good at healing the melee taking the pounding. I've still never seen it used in practice, and now I'm curious. It's instant-cast nature sounds great (on paper, again), though it requires people in that group be pretty-closely clustered (within a 15-yard-radius circle), a behavior the game tends to penalize in many fights.
D'oh! You're right, I've never even seen a priest take Circle of Healing.
I remember someone did a sweep of several thousand random armory profiles of level 70 characters and did a breakdown of percentages of builds, and of those builds, what percentages took the 31-point and 41-point talents. Pretty interesting.
Yup. It has little to do with the actual functionality of what you are wearing and more to do with peoples' perceptions of you. The perception of the man in a ski mask (unless, as another poster pointed out, there's an actual blizzard outside) is that a robbery is imminent. While you may not go to jail or have criminal charges leveled against you, you'll likely have to spend some time explaining to the police what's going on.
Most Security through Obscurity schemes have some sort of minimal protection besides just knowing about it. If there are real valuables in the trunk, it's not tough for a determined thief to get in there. Most of the time there's not enough there to make the effort worth it. But if a thief knew that your newly-purchased computer or other valuables were being stored there?
I don't think they'll care. I hear their commercials all the time on the radio and they're constantly talking about how fast their downloads are. That usually seems to be an ISP's selling point since most people don't care about upload bandwidth.
Here's an experiment. Walk into your local bank or 7-11 or whatnot wearing a ski mask.
You might be doubtful, but I have the suspicion that you'll find out ski masks are pretty much banned already in every location but the ski slopes.
Why? Because, except on said ski slopes, under normal circumstances the only time people wear ski masks is to rob.
When a tool is used far more often for illegal purposes than it is for legal purposes then, whether it's fair or even warranted, a very dark cloud of suspicion will fall on those who use that tool.
I'd point to things such as "https" as reasons for legal encryption, as well as the specter of identity theft, cracking, and so forth.
Encrypted peer-to-peer though. How much of that traffic do you think is actually legal? Honestly?
Well, you can still determine that it's Bittorrent traffic, can't you? You just can't snoop the stream to see what exactly is being shared.
I dunno, that sounds suspiciously like "security through obscurity" to me!
You may see this as a troll post, but Blizzard has been clear with their actions they're not interested in class balance, only in buffing (making stronger) the classes that the dev's mainly play. For those uninformed, Kalgan is the head designer/game balancer, and his current favorite class is Warrior.
If all this "Kalgan favors warriors" nonsense was actually true, then the arms tree would have had a worthwhile 41-point talent by now. Endless Rage is competing with Lightwell for the honor of "least often taken 41-point talent for someone specced into that tree." Arms warriors didn't get buffed, since because there's no reason to spec more than 31-33 points in arms, pvp warriors will still dump a bunch of points into fury and get everything they want there, just like before. In fact, you could say that the change to disarm mechanics serves as a nerf to the formerly-disarm-immune warrior. Then there are the fury warriors, and the jury is still out on whether the loss of Death Wish will be balanced by the increased threat reduction. I suppose it will depend on the encounter, but the fury warrior won't be able to ramp up his damage as much for Death Wish+Execute to burn out enraged bosses. At least prot will benefit from the expertise change. It's a bit of a nerf to my orc axe racial skill though.