And thus, the reason why the % exists. It allows us to determine if a 1kg change is significant (weight of a bowling ball), insignificant (weight of the earth), of wildly significant (weight of a swallow) by giving a single digit which compares the magnitude of change to the initial value.
In other words, 4% of a value is not an 'infinitesimal' change, even if the values of concern are generally considered to be infinitesimally small. As far as relative change, it is significant enough to care (1/25th).
And while it might be OK for Joe the console player, but it is unacceptable for competitive PC players, who tweak every single input device in order to lover lag.
Isn't this service intended for 'Joe the console player', and not for competitive PC gamers? In other words, it's an entirely reasonable trade-off.
I think the issue here is all the 'hardcore' gamers who worry about this kind of stuff were never the target market, because they're 'hardcore' enough to put tons of money into their own rig. The recreational player just wants the cheapest method that's acceptable, and that's what the service is aimed for. Of course, it's mostly the hardcore gamer who posts on forums, not the recreational ones, so it's nothing but hate in the internet echo chamber.
... except of course, that the chilling effect real names will have may stop a lot of others from posting those useful questions/answers, thus making your suggested technique much less useful.
Exactly why I'm against it. It breaks a perfectly good system.
In my day, we used FAQs to fix problems. And 'my day' wasn't all that long ago.
I would say that the best use for a support forum is assistance from other players, before the support team can help you. Of course, you don't need the official forums for this.
And companies will never take risks like this, because their executives can be held responsible for any harm their company causes..... oh wait, that's not right.
If the executives can get rich while risking their company go bankrupt, they will do it and keep the boatload of cash they made while doing it.
I'm not saying it needs to be announced everywhere, or for no reason. However, when we're talking about social interaction, I think real name can be a reasonable expectation. Think of real-world equivalents: your car has a unique - but anonymized - identifier, while you give first and/or last for most social interactions.
What they should probably do is make an all inclusive query that allows you to specify that you want DM,Timeline,LIST1,LIST45 updates, and it would provide you with all of those, with an XML/JSON field that indicated what the message source was. They would have to increase the messages per request limit to something reasonable like 1000-5000, and allow requesting say 10 different sources at once.
I think 200 messages is a reasonable return rate, if only one universal query is required, instead of multiple. That's still an average of one API call per 20 seconds (say, query all every minute, that still allows two other calls per minute for messages out or overflow updates) which should be enough for most reasonable uses.
If you're getting more than 200 messages per minute, there might need to be a reevaluation of your Twitter usage. That's a lot for an individual to read. Anyone who wants to do something aggregating Tweets would of course be blocked, but I can't blame Twitter for wanting to stop 3rd party aggregators.
If you're only following a single feed. But I have like 10 lists in TweetDeck that all get individually queried, and there are some who have WAY more than that.
So why does it take multiple API queries? Shouldn't it grab everything all at once, perhaps with the option to prioritize the current window worth of results? I can understand requiring a separate call to view profiles, or perform a search, but whether I'm following 1 person or 100 people, I expect it should take just 1 call to receive all the tweets.
While it's a cute and funny Panny-arcade strip, it's not true.
Actually, there is research that suggests that under anonymous circumstances, otherwise normal people begin to behave in anti-social ways. Article Research paper Another paper One more
Do you think people would behave better when they drive if their real name was on their car? No. However retaliation for precieved slight would certainly increase.
The better question to ask is if people drive with less regard because they feel they are unidentifiable. Would you shout at a driver who cut you off if you knew they could hear you and find you? Would you drive around a line of backed up cars and force your way into line if you believed your reputation could be affected?
As for retaliation, privacy is already a myth. Anyone who wants to retaliate already can with a little bit of investigation. Physical retaliation is still rare, though. Using real names just removes this facade of privacy, making it obvious to those who speak that they can be held responsible and accountable for their actions (as they already can), and thus reinstating the disincentive to behave badly.
Wouldn't cheaper crops with higher yields reduce the need for farm subsidies?
You're right that it's the politics that causes the big problems, but that doesn't preclude GM crops from being used in conjunction with fixing the politics to solve our food issues.
If we removed patent protections on GM seeds, Monsanto would probably just reneg on their promise not to use 'terminator'-gene seeds, which produce sterile seeds. Thus, we trade the problem of patent lawsuits for the fear of cross-contaminating our world food supply into sterility.
Monsanto 'piggy-backs' the genes, though. Their first gene that provided resistance to Roundup herbicide (which makes farming so economically superior it's almost mandatory) has a patent expiring in 2014 (for soybeans). However, Monsanto has two methods for preventing use of this gene by farmers.
1) They are marketing their 2nd generation of Roundup-safe soybeans, which have higher yields. They still have the market on the best plants (arguably, this is innovation and good).
2) They ensure that buying a seed with the Roundup Ready gene also has other, patented genes. Thus the seed is still covered under a Monsanto patent, and can't be replanted by the farmer.
Fortunately, since the patent is up, other companies can create seeds with this gene. It's possible they might not even place other patented genes in, which would allow the farmers to reseed.
Uh, isn't giving out a screen name if you think you've said stupid stuff, kind of uh, well, a bad thing to be doing?:)
Stupid yes, but nothing unacceptably so. If saying something obnoxious when I was a teenager is reason to disqualify me from a job, I don't want that job anyway.
Not necessarily. I've seen many trolls silenced purely through removing that veil of anonymity. Generally, a troll wants to feed their ego, which is hard to do when people are laughing at your MySpace photos.
That said, I think Blizzard's handling of minor's real names is unfortunate, here. It seems this will be rolled out before there are protections in place, which I think is a big no-no. Either the parental controls should be there first, or all minors should be blocked until that time.
That said, I'm pretty certain that they (or any other investigator) could find any and all screen names I ever used, so it doesn't really matter if I volunteer them or not.
Does Blizzard not have another tech support pathway? E-mail or private support requests? I don't play any Blizzard games, so I don't know.
If that's the case, then it's an issue with Blizzard's implementation. In general, I don't think there's any problem with linking an official forum account to a real name.
That is a predicament, but more because they are trying to phase it in. This wouldn't be an issue if it were the way the game was when released, and those with an objection could simply not sign up to begin with.
Real Internet Detectives can usually find an actual name from just the screen name already, so you're already 'in danger' of this happening RIGHT NOW! How often does it happen, though?
I've usually seen this in response to trolls who attempt to hide behind their anonymity. They tend to disappear when their MySpace pictures get posted in response to their troll posts.
At the risk of making the stale old 'they aren't holding a gun to your head' argument, I find the word "force" to be pure rhetoric. It's not even the game itself, just the official forums for the game, which is both optional and has alternatives. It's rather trivial to avoid giving your name if you don't want to.
Why shouldn't I seperate my online persona(s) from my real life identity? What problem is Blizzard trying to solve here?
The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People are less likely to act like an asshole if they don't have anonymity to hide behind. The only people who will be idiots any more are those who are idiots already.
Another example of a game using real names is iRacing, though real names are used throughout the game, instead of just on the forums. Again, the idea is to discourage anti-social behavior (intentional wrecking, profanity, etc), and this is part of their aggressive policing against griefers. In this case, such a prevention is especially necessary for a racing game of this type. I don't frequent the Blizzard forums, so I'm not sure if there are enough douchebags there to justify such measures.
I make it a point to avoid any forum identity that could be easliy traced back to my real name, because stuff comes back to haunt you. Do you really want somehting you said 20 years ago in some gaming forum to come up in a job interview?
In that case, either:
1) Don't be a jack-ass on the Blizzard forums.
2) Don't use the Blizzard forums.
That said, I've given my screen name which I've used for the last decade as part of a background check for an interview, so I'm well aware of the issue. However, nothing I said in the past (I've said a lot of stupid stuff) was an issue. If it is a concern to you, don't use the forums (it's an optional part of an optional game you play, you can deal with it), or simply police your behavior before it is recorded for all posterity on the Intertubes.
I've noticed quite a trend of people on Slashdot being anti-money. Is there a problem with people who work hard and earn more than $40k/year (or 50, 60; whatever the waterline may be) or something? Or must one suffer and live in one's parents' basement earning paltry sums in order to maintain credibility?
Let me walk you through this douchebag argument as it applies to musicians:
"Musicians are supposed to love the music, not money. That's why they should be happy if they get paid enough to finance their tour bus and a few pop-tarts. That's why $5-10 is the most anyone should pay for a ticket."
You're right, and this argument ignores three very important points:
1) Playing music well is expensive. Equipment to perform at one of these large venues with an acceptable sound (to both the audience and the musician), plus spares in case things break, adds up to a lot (particularly for drummers). In short: the costs are more than that of the tour bus and food.
2) Continuing this line, as a professional musician, there probably isn't a secondary source of income. With the amount of practice required, and that except for teaching music lessons or being a contract-hire studio musician (aka, 'selling out' to some), the skills don't really translate well, a day job may be out of the question. If you want to see a musician, you have to be willing to accept that if you expect them to entertain you for a living, they need to make enough money to make a living themselves (including their dependents and eventual retirement).
3) There are a lot of other people dipping into that pot of money. The venue, promoter, manager, techs, and everyone else involved get some of that money too. There's just no way that each member of a 5-piece band selling $5 tickets will walk away with $1 for each attendee.
That's not to say some musicians aren't gluttons for cash, but the general expectation seems to be that of a vow of poverty.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean seriously, what did this guy do or fail to do?
Lead and instill a culture of safety and accountability in a company with a history of dangerous cost cutting.
He also produced some of the most incredible PR gaffes in recent memory. It's easy to hate someone when they're wholly unlikeable.
Would this relate to triangles and the universe?
And thus, the reason why the % exists. It allows us to determine if a 1kg change is significant (weight of a bowling ball), insignificant (weight of the earth), of wildly significant (weight of a swallow) by giving a single digit which compares the magnitude of change to the initial value.
In other words, 4% of a value is not an 'infinitesimal' change, even if the values of concern are generally considered to be infinitesimally small. As far as relative change, it is significant enough to care (1/25th).
And while it might be OK for Joe the console player, but it is unacceptable for competitive PC players, who tweak every single input device in order to lover lag.
Isn't this service intended for 'Joe the console player', and not for competitive PC gamers? In other words, it's an entirely reasonable trade-off.
I think the issue here is all the 'hardcore' gamers who worry about this kind of stuff were never the target market, because they're 'hardcore' enough to put tons of money into their own rig. The recreational player just wants the cheapest method that's acceptable, and that's what the service is aimed for. Of course, it's mostly the hardcore gamer who posts on forums, not the recreational ones, so it's nothing but hate in the internet echo chamber.
Exactly why I'm against it. It breaks a perfectly good system.
In my day, we used FAQs to fix problems. And 'my day' wasn't all that long ago.
I would say that the best use for a support forum is assistance from other players, before the support team can help you. Of course, you don't need the official forums for this.
And companies will never take risks like this, because their executives can be held responsible for any harm their company causes..... oh wait, that's not right.
If the executives can get rich while risking their company go bankrupt, they will do it and keep the boatload of cash they made while doing it.
Yup.
I'm not saying it needs to be announced everywhere, or for no reason. However, when we're talking about social interaction, I think real name can be a reasonable expectation. Think of real-world equivalents: your car has a unique - but anonymized - identifier, while you give first and/or last for most social interactions.
What they should probably do is make an all inclusive query that allows you to specify that you want DM,Timeline,LIST1,LIST45 updates, and it would provide you with all of those, with an XML/JSON field that indicated what the message source was. They would have to increase the messages per request limit to something reasonable like 1000-5000, and allow requesting say 10 different sources at once.
I think 200 messages is a reasonable return rate, if only one universal query is required, instead of multiple. That's still an average of one API call per 20 seconds (say, query all every minute, that still allows two other calls per minute for messages out or overflow updates) which should be enough for most reasonable uses.
If you're getting more than 200 messages per minute, there might need to be a reevaluation of your Twitter usage. That's a lot for an individual to read. Anyone who wants to do something aggregating Tweets would of course be blocked, but I can't blame Twitter for wanting to stop 3rd party aggregators.
If you're only following a single feed. But I have like 10 lists in TweetDeck that all get individually queried, and there are some who have WAY more than that.
So why does it take multiple API queries? Shouldn't it grab everything all at once, perhaps with the option to prioritize the current window worth of results? I can understand requiring a separate call to view profiles, or perform a search, but whether I'm following 1 person or 100 people, I expect it should take just 1 call to receive all the tweets.
While it's a cute and funny Panny-arcade strip, it's not true.
Actually, there is research that suggests that under anonymous circumstances, otherwise normal people begin to behave in anti-social ways.
Article
Research paper
Another paper
One more
Do you think people would behave better when they drive if their real name was on their car? No. However retaliation for precieved slight would certainly increase.
The better question to ask is if people drive with less regard because they feel they are unidentifiable. Would you shout at a driver who cut you off if you knew they could hear you and find you? Would you drive around a line of backed up cars and force your way into line if you believed your reputation could be affected?
As for retaliation, privacy is already a myth. Anyone who wants to retaliate already can with a little bit of investigation. Physical retaliation is still rare, though. Using real names just removes this facade of privacy, making it obvious to those who speak that they can be held responsible and accountable for their actions (as they already can), and thus reinstating the disincentive to behave badly.
Wouldn't cheaper crops with higher yields reduce the need for farm subsidies?
You're right that it's the politics that causes the big problems, but that doesn't preclude GM crops from being used in conjunction with fixing the politics to solve our food issues.
If we removed patent protections on GM seeds, Monsanto would probably just reneg on their promise not to use 'terminator'-gene seeds, which produce sterile seeds. Thus, we trade the problem of patent lawsuits for the fear of cross-contaminating our world food supply into sterility.
Monsanto 'piggy-backs' the genes, though. Their first gene that provided resistance to Roundup herbicide (which makes farming so economically superior it's almost mandatory) has a patent expiring in 2014 (for soybeans). However, Monsanto has two methods for preventing use of this gene by farmers.
1) They are marketing their 2nd generation of Roundup-safe soybeans, which have higher yields. They still have the market on the best plants (arguably, this is innovation and good).
2) They ensure that buying a seed with the Roundup Ready gene also has other, patented genes. Thus the seed is still covered under a Monsanto patent, and can't be replanted by the farmer.
Fortunately, since the patent is up, other companies can create seeds with this gene. It's possible they might not even place other patented genes in, which would allow the farmers to reseed.
You mean hellaLame. Combined, they are 2 hellaLame.
Uh, isn't giving out a screen name if you think you've said stupid stuff, kind of uh, well, a bad thing to be doing? :)
Stupid yes, but nothing unacceptably so. If saying something obnoxious when I was a teenager is reason to disqualify me from a job, I don't want that job anyway.
I use Bakkster because it practically is my name. My friends use it frequently in IRL conversations.
If you can't search and find my real name, your Google-fu is very weak indeed.
Not necessarily. I've seen many trolls silenced purely through removing that veil of anonymity. Generally, a troll wants to feed their ego, which is hard to do when people are laughing at your MySpace photos.
That said, I think Blizzard's handling of minor's real names is unfortunate, here. It seems this will be rolled out before there are protections in place, which I think is a big no-no. Either the parental controls should be there first, or all minors should be blocked until that time.
It was required, though the job was worth it.
That said, I'm pretty certain that they (or any other investigator) could find any and all screen names I ever used, so it doesn't really matter if I volunteer them or not.
Does Blizzard not have another tech support pathway? E-mail or private support requests? I don't play any Blizzard games, so I don't know.
If that's the case, then it's an issue with Blizzard's implementation. In general, I don't think there's any problem with linking an official forum account to a real name.
That is a predicament, but more because they are trying to phase it in. This wouldn't be an issue if it were the way the game was when released, and those with an objection could simply not sign up to begin with.
I agree, anyone who is concerned should just use an alternative forum. Problem solved.
Real Internet Detectives can usually find an actual name from just the screen name already, so you're already 'in danger' of this happening RIGHT NOW! How often does it happen, though?
I've usually seen this in response to trolls who attempt to hide behind their anonymity. They tend to disappear when their MySpace pictures get posted in response to their troll posts.
Blizzard is forcing them to...
At the risk of making the stale old 'they aren't holding a gun to your head' argument, I find the word "force" to be pure rhetoric. It's not even the game itself, just the official forums for the game, which is both optional and has alternatives. It's rather trivial to avoid giving your name if you don't want to.
Why shouldn't I seperate my online persona(s) from my real life identity? What problem is Blizzard trying to solve here?
The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People are less likely to act like an asshole if they don't have anonymity to hide behind. The only people who will be idiots any more are those who are idiots already.
Another example of a game using real names is iRacing, though real names are used throughout the game, instead of just on the forums. Again, the idea is to discourage anti-social behavior (intentional wrecking, profanity, etc), and this is part of their aggressive policing against griefers. In this case, such a prevention is especially necessary for a racing game of this type. I don't frequent the Blizzard forums, so I'm not sure if there are enough douchebags there to justify such measures.
I make it a point to avoid any forum identity that could be easliy traced back to my real name, because stuff comes back to haunt you. Do you really want somehting you said 20 years ago in some gaming forum to come up in a job interview?
In that case, either:
1) Don't be a jack-ass on the Blizzard forums.
2) Don't use the Blizzard forums.
That said, I've given my screen name which I've used for the last decade as part of a background check for an interview, so I'm well aware of the issue. However, nothing I said in the past (I've said a lot of stupid stuff) was an issue. If it is a concern to you, don't use the forums (it's an optional part of an optional game you play, you can deal with it), or simply police your behavior before it is recorded for all posterity on the Intertubes.
I've noticed quite a trend of people on Slashdot being anti-money. Is there a problem with people who work hard and earn more than $40k/year (or 50, 60; whatever the waterline may be) or something? Or must one suffer and live in one's parents' basement earning paltry sums in order to maintain credibility?
Let me walk you through this douchebag argument as it applies to musicians:
"Musicians are supposed to love the music, not money. That's why they should be happy if they get paid enough to finance their tour bus and a few pop-tarts. That's why $5-10 is the most anyone should pay for a ticket."
You're right, and this argument ignores three very important points:
1) Playing music well is expensive. Equipment to perform at one of these large venues with an acceptable sound (to both the audience and the musician), plus spares in case things break, adds up to a lot (particularly for drummers). In short: the costs are more than that of the tour bus and food.
2) Continuing this line, as a professional musician, there probably isn't a secondary source of income. With the amount of practice required, and that except for teaching music lessons or being a contract-hire studio musician (aka, 'selling out' to some), the skills don't really translate well, a day job may be out of the question. If you want to see a musician, you have to be willing to accept that if you expect them to entertain you for a living, they need to make enough money to make a living themselves (including their dependents and eventual retirement).
3) There are a lot of other people dipping into that pot of money. The venue, promoter, manager, techs, and everyone else involved get some of that money too. There's just no way that each member of a 5-piece band selling $5 tickets will walk away with $1 for each attendee.
That's not to say some musicians aren't gluttons for cash, but the general expectation seems to be that of a vow of poverty.