Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity
on
Diablo III Beta Begins
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· Score: 3
So...you haven't bought a recent WoW expansion, or Starcraft II, and you won't be buying Diablo III.
In other words, you haven't bought a Blizzard game since, when? Diablo II? Brood War? You haven't bought a Blizzard game in something like ten years, and you're upset that the way games are played and the requirements for those games has changed out from under you? Do you still want your games only to be playable with the disc in the drive, too? Which, by the way, was as frowned upon back then as DRM is frowned upon now. Same stuff, different decade.
From my experience, the older titles I've gotten from Amazon have been hastily OCRed and not proofread, I'm assuming to give Amazon a back catalog or books to intially entice people to buy their Kindles for. It worked on me, at least initially, but I had to train myself to substitute common OCR errors in my head as I was reading. It was a wholly unpleasant experience and wrecked my concentration. I went back to buying actual books, which has been better - I spend 8+ hours a day in front of a computer screen at work, let alone any home computer or screen-related downtime. If I pick up something to read, I want a BOOK - I want an interface I don't even have to think about, and readers feel too much like work to me.
My point being, Amazon leaning on their extensive library of "older" titles is a bit of a letdown. The quality just isn't up to par.
V for Vendetta? Seriously? That quote's from W.B. Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html
Credit where it's due.
You got invited somewhere awesome by a member of the/. community, and all we get is a thank you and a request to be let into more awesome places? It would've killed you to snap a few pictures, or to have set up an interview, or to have given us something, anything, back in return?
Either make a big deal out of it when this happens and do some actual, experiential blogging, or keep quiet about it, but this story is just...a smirk.
I work nowhere remotely interesting these days, but if I did, after this story I wouldn't be inclined to help yo
...which, if I had bothered to read the opening paragraph instead of jumping right to the charts, I would have noticed was factored in and included as "interaction."
Whoops indeed.
My issue I guess is with the summary - "apps such as facebook" implies applications with functionality similar to facebook, rather than applications, one of which is a facebook app.
The study appears to have missed something fairly crucial and not especially obvious to people over 30 - they differentiate phone calls from "smartphone non-voice usage" at various times of the day, but apparently fail to take into account the fact that, for many young people, their alarm clocks are apps on their phones - I interact with my phone every morning in bed, but it's because it's waking me up, not because I'm checking facebook.
Have you seen the pictures of what NYC looked like in the late 1800's when every telegraph company had competing lines strung up on every street? In some places you couldn't see the sky.
There's this odd foreshortening of perspective in some geeks where they seem to get terribly emotionally involved in whether or not somebody else likes something that they don't.
(stereotypes ahead)
If you've spent years realizing, by outside standards, that you're not athletic, or socially adept, or popular, or catered to, you realize the thing you CAN be is right. Being right about things that are quantifiable is risky, but being right about things that are completely subjective delivers the superiority payload while carrying very little actual risk.
And then I read it and realized he's talking about tracking me on the internet (trendy!) and not about actually preventing my personal, kind of a bigger deal, Rights, from being trampled on - the TSA and Guantanamo and security theater and 9/11 as an excuse to let law enforcement do whatever it feels like in the name of security and wiretapping and the lack of judicial review.
Remember kids: cite your sources. Or at the very least, If you're going to lift a line from somebody, put quotes around it so you don't look like a fool when somebody calls you on it like I'm about to.
That would be Trillian from the TV serial, not Trillian from the original radio serial which, for Peter Davison, must've been a shame - I'd take the latter's voice over the former's everything else, any day.
Farming causes massive industrial pollution now, let alone on the scale necessary to feed a country of people who eat nothing else. I don't deny that the way we treat the animals we eat is disgusting, but you've gotta realize that, no matter how we do it, feeding a species like ours with a population the size of ours is going to suck no matter how we go about doing it, either for the animals involved or for the environment as a whole.
Industrialized food production is going to continue because, for every person like you who cares, there are thousands of people who just need to eat dinner cheaply. Your best bet is to eat food from local farms and dairies, vegetarian or not, where you can take a walk through the place and see how they do business.
Your relationship with your doctor is based on trust and consent - you don't ask your taxi driver to submit to a breathalyzer before he drives you home, so why should you ask your doctor how he's sleeping? If you don't trust your doctor to be operating on you in good condition, you need to find yourself a different doctor.
You're laboring under the faulty assumption that classical scores don't ever change. That can't be more untrue.
Think about it like a literary translation: a copy of "The Clouds" translated in 1850 is going to be drastically different from one translated last year - the contemporary translator has another 150 years of scholarship to draw on to interpret the work; classical music works the same way.
10k for a version of a score in the public domain is ridiculous, I agree, but 10k to update, rescore, reinterpret, and rearrange a work from 200 years ago that hasn't be touched since? That isn't at all a waste of money.
"I don't mind them doing it, but this is insane, especially when doing it in an area highly sensitized to flying missiles/planes."
As a New Yorker, can I just say: stop assuming shit about how we feel about 9/11 and 9/11 related things. As a community, we got over the terrorist attack years and years and fucking YEARS ago; it's people from not-here who keep this crap up.
We're fine with RC geeks. We don't cringe every time a plane flies overhead. We're totally, completely fine with Muslims. Stop, please, just stop making assumptions and taking actions based on how you think we think about something that happened a decade ago, and let it GO, already. Find somebody else's banner to carry.
Glad you're happy with the service you have, but that isn't the issue. The issue is that ISPs are advertising their services as "broadband" where the FCC has a definition of "broadband" that the providers are failing to meet - if I'm paying for 4mbps downstream and I'm getting 1, that's false advertising.
I use an above-average amount of bandwidth. Between Netflix and gaming and youtube and the occasional bittorrent, I feel like, without having any hard numbers at-hand because Comcast's bandwidth meter can't be found on their website (despite their steamroller media blitz that hyped up how proactive it makes people at watching their usage. Way to fail, Comcast,) I fall on the higher end of the usage spectrum but nowhere near the 250gb/month cap; probably 80gb - 100gb if I had to guess, maybe even 50-60gb most months.
It would make sense to me that, since I fall on the upper-end of the usage spectrum compared to, say, bittorrent seeders on one end and grandmas who check their email every couple days on the other, my bill would stay more or less the same on a metered plan, grandma's would drop significantly and Mr. torrent freak's would go up; a reduction would be nice, but I would be okay with not paying more.
However. If (heh. If.) the cable companies see this as a way of milking all their customers for all they're worth as an incentive to get them to pay more for an unlimited plan by scaring them with an inflated per MB bill...
Yeah. This could be good if the rates are reasonable, but I'll eat my hat if that turns out to be the case.
It may take a court order but they will hand it over all the same.
As opposed to other telecom companies that hand over data on their customers because the DoJ asked them to?
I don't have a problem with Google for handing over logs when presented with a court order. I may have a problem with the government asking in the first place, and I may take issue with judges effectively signing warrants without looking at them critically because a federal agent cited some nebulous and ill-proven terrorist threat to wiretap Grandma to get her chocolate chip cookie recipe, but I don't have a problem with Google for following the law.
It's when they start handing over information without being served with a warrant that I'll start having problems.
Considering the bandwidth usage of many of the common web-based services and applications out there, DSL barely qualifies as Broadband.
We had 1.5mbps DSL for 6 months or so. There was enough of a bottleneck between our bandwidth needs (system upgrades, WoW patches, Hulu / Netflix streaming) and our available bandwidth that we had to schedule downloads for over-night. It wasn't a big deal necessarily, but more than anything else it amazed me how many applications out there assume a fast, always-on and practically unlimited downstream. We'd be watching a movie on Netflix and the stream would cut out, and we'd have to go hunting to figure out which system process on which computer suddenly started hogging the bits. Windows and MacOS background downloads were big culprits.
So we switched to Cable, (15mbps down, doesn't fizz out during lightning storms, low latency, etc) and, in a heartbeat, stopped worrying about all that crap.
While I hate everything that Comcast does on a policy level, it doesn't have any practical competition. Saying "if you don't like Cable get DSL" now is like saying "if you don't like DSL get dialup" a decade ago.
And yes, I realize I could have set up routing rules and bandwidth-by-protocol limits, and I'm capable of doing so, but most people aren't - most people want to plug the thing in and not have to worry about it anymore.
I compared status updates to searches partially because that's what the study I got my numbers from did, and partially because I couldn't find actual data on searches done on FB and figured that comparing two similar but not necessarily congruent actions and letting others estimate for themselves the relationship between updates and searches was more honest than making shit up.
Maybe I use FB differently than other people, but after I found my friends and barring the occasional vanity search, I don't search at all.
(PS. I AM one of those marketing people, just not a, you know, an evil one.)
Slashdot Mirror
So...you haven't bought a recent WoW expansion, or Starcraft II, and you won't be buying Diablo III.
In other words, you haven't bought a Blizzard game since, when? Diablo II? Brood War? You haven't bought a Blizzard game in something like ten years, and you're upset that the way games are played and the requirements for those games has changed out from under you? Do you still want your games only to be playable with the disc in the drive, too? Which, by the way, was as frowned upon back then as DRM is frowned upon now. Same stuff, different decade.
Get with the times, man.
From my experience, the older titles I've gotten from Amazon have been hastily OCRed and not proofread, I'm assuming to give Amazon a back catalog or books to intially entice people to buy their Kindles for. It worked on me, at least initially, but I had to train myself to substitute common OCR errors in my head as I was reading. It was a wholly unpleasant experience and wrecked my concentration. I went back to buying actual books, which has been better - I spend 8+ hours a day in front of a computer screen at work, let alone any home computer or screen-related downtime. If I pick up something to read, I want a BOOK - I want an interface I don't even have to think about, and readers feel too much like work to me.
My point being, Amazon leaning on their extensive library of "older" titles is a bit of a letdown. The quality just isn't up to par.
V for Vendetta? Seriously? That quote's from W.B. Yeats: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html Credit where it's due.
You got invited somewhere awesome by a member of the /. community, and all we get is a thank you and a request to be let into more awesome places? It would've killed you to snap a few pictures, or to have set up an interview, or to have given us something, anything, back in return?
Either make a big deal out of it when this happens and do some actual, experiential blogging, or keep quiet about it, but this story is just...a smirk.
I work nowhere remotely interesting these days, but if I did, after this story I wouldn't be inclined to help yo
...which, if I had bothered to read the opening paragraph instead of jumping right to the charts, I would have noticed was factored in and included as "interaction."
Whoops indeed.
My issue I guess is with the summary - "apps such as facebook" implies applications with functionality similar to facebook, rather than applications, one of which is a facebook app.
ah well.
The study appears to have missed something fairly crucial and not especially obvious to people over 30 - they differentiate phone calls from "smartphone non-voice usage" at various times of the day, but apparently fail to take into account the fact that, for many young people, their alarm clocks are apps on their phones - I interact with my phone every morning in bed, but it's because it's waking me up, not because I'm checking facebook.
Have you seen the pictures of what NYC looked like in the late 1800's when every telegraph company had competing lines strung up on every street? In some places you couldn't see the sky.
http://nihrecord.od.nih.gov/newsletters/09_18_2001/story03.htm
Is that what you're looking forward to?
I'm sure some non-NC people think that Charlotte is the only city in NC.
You're assuming that most non-NC people think about NC enough to get the geography wrong, where the truth is we can't be bothered even that much.
Huh. Sounds like a 21st century version of the routing failure that caused the 1965 Northeast blackout, just with data instead of electricity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Blackout_of_1965
There's this odd foreshortening of perspective in some geeks where they seem to get terribly emotionally involved in whether or not somebody else likes something that they don't.
(stereotypes ahead)
If you've spent years realizing, by outside standards, that you're not athletic, or socially adept, or popular, or catered to, you realize the thing you CAN be is right. Being right about things that are quantifiable is risky, but being right about things that are completely subjective delivers the superiority payload while carrying very little actual risk.
--Triv
I saw that headline and I felt a ray of hope.
And then I read it and realized he's talking about tracking me on the internet (trendy!) and not about actually preventing my personal, kind of a bigger deal, Rights, from being trampled on - the TSA and Guantanamo and security theater and 9/11 as an excuse to let law enforcement do whatever it feels like in the name of security and wiretapping and the lack of judicial review.
But we got a Facebook Bill of Rights instead.
Amazing.
--Triv
The first clue, and the only clue you need, that "Syfy" had no respect for science fiction came when it changed its name to "Syfy."
Remember kids: cite your sources. Or at the very least, If you're going to lift a line from somebody, put quotes around it so you don't look like a fool when somebody calls you on it like I'm about to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Brigstocke#Pac-Man_joke
That would be Trillian from the TV serial, not Trillian from the original radio serial which, for Peter Davison, must've been a shame - I'd take the latter's voice over the former's everything else, any day.
Veganism is an option.
Yay! More industrially produced corn! :/
Farming causes massive industrial pollution now, let alone on the scale necessary to feed a country of people who eat nothing else. I don't deny that the way we treat the animals we eat is disgusting, but you've gotta realize that, no matter how we do it, feeding a species like ours with a population the size of ours is going to suck no matter how we go about doing it, either for the animals involved or for the environment as a whole.
Industrialized food production is going to continue because, for every person like you who cares, there are thousands of people who just need to eat dinner cheaply. Your best bet is to eat food from local farms and dairies, vegetarian or not, where you can take a walk through the place and see how they do business.
Your relationship with your doctor is based on trust and consent - you don't ask your taxi driver to submit to a breathalyzer before he drives you home, so why should you ask your doctor how he's sleeping? If you don't trust your doctor to be operating on you in good condition, you need to find yourself a different doctor.
You're laboring under the faulty assumption that classical scores don't ever change. That can't be more untrue.
Think about it like a literary translation: a copy of "The Clouds" translated in 1850 is going to be drastically different from one translated last year - the contemporary translator has another 150 years of scholarship to draw on to interpret the work; classical music works the same way.
10k for a version of a score in the public domain is ridiculous, I agree, but 10k to update, rescore, reinterpret, and rearrange a work from 200 years ago that hasn't be touched since? That isn't at all a waste of money.
"I don't mind them doing it, but this is insane, especially when doing it in an area highly sensitized to flying missiles/planes."
As a New Yorker, can I just say: stop assuming shit about how we feel about 9/11 and 9/11 related things. As a community, we got over the terrorist attack years and years and fucking YEARS ago; it's people from not-here who keep this crap up.
We're fine with RC geeks. We don't cringe every time a plane flies overhead. We're totally, completely fine with Muslims. Stop, please, just stop making assumptions and taking actions based on how you think we think about something that happened a decade ago, and let it GO, already. Find somebody else's banner to carry.
"And the real world today lets people use spell checkers, so why not in non-English classes like the various sciences."
the irony inherent in that statement being that a good deal of specialized scientific language won't appear in most commercial spell-checkers anyway.
Glad you're happy with the service you have, but that isn't the issue. The issue is that ISPs are advertising their services as "broadband" where the FCC has a definition of "broadband" that the providers are failing to meet - if I'm paying for 4mbps downstream and I'm getting 1, that's false advertising.
I was just talking to a coworker about this.
I use an above-average amount of bandwidth. Between Netflix and gaming and youtube and the occasional bittorrent, I feel like, without having any hard numbers at-hand because Comcast's bandwidth meter can't be found on their website (despite their steamroller media blitz that hyped up how proactive it makes people at watching their usage. Way to fail, Comcast,) I fall on the higher end of the usage spectrum but nowhere near the 250gb/month cap; probably 80gb - 100gb if I had to guess, maybe even 50-60gb most months.
It would make sense to me that, since I fall on the upper-end of the usage spectrum compared to, say, bittorrent seeders on one end and grandmas who check their email every couple days on the other, my bill would stay more or less the same on a metered plan, grandma's would drop significantly and Mr. torrent freak's would go up; a reduction would be nice, but I would be okay with not paying more.
However. If (heh. If.) the cable companies see this as a way of milking all their customers for all they're worth as an incentive to get them to pay more for an unlimited plan by scaring them with an inflated per MB bill...
Yeah. This could be good if the rates are reasonable, but I'll eat my hat if that turns out to be the case.
It may take a court order but they will hand it over all the same.
As opposed to other telecom companies that hand over data on their customers because the DoJ asked them to?
I don't have a problem with Google for handing over logs when presented with a court order. I may have a problem with the government asking in the first place, and I may take issue with judges effectively signing warrants without looking at them critically because a federal agent cited some nebulous and ill-proven terrorist threat to wiretap Grandma to get her chocolate chip cookie recipe, but I don't have a problem with Google for following the law.
It's when they start handing over information without being served with a warrant that I'll start having problems.
Considering the bandwidth usage of many of the common web-based services and applications out there, DSL barely qualifies as Broadband.
We had 1.5mbps DSL for 6 months or so. There was enough of a bottleneck between our bandwidth needs (system upgrades, WoW patches, Hulu / Netflix streaming) and our available bandwidth that we had to schedule downloads for over-night. It wasn't a big deal necessarily, but more than anything else it amazed me how many applications out there assume a fast, always-on and practically unlimited downstream. We'd be watching a movie on Netflix and the stream would cut out, and we'd have to go hunting to figure out which system process on which computer suddenly started hogging the bits. Windows and MacOS background downloads were big culprits.
So we switched to Cable, (15mbps down, doesn't fizz out during lightning storms, low latency, etc) and, in a heartbeat, stopped worrying about all that crap.
While I hate everything that Comcast does on a policy level, it doesn't have any practical competition. Saying "if you don't like Cable get DSL" now is like saying "if you don't like DSL get dialup" a decade ago.
And yes, I realize I could have set up routing rules and bandwidth-by-protocol limits, and I'm capable of doing so, but most people aren't - most people want to plug the thing in and not have to worry about it anymore.
I compared status updates to searches partially because that's what the study I got my numbers from did, and partially because I couldn't find actual data on searches done on FB and figured that comparing two similar but not necessarily congruent actions and letting others estimate for themselves the relationship between updates and searches was more honest than making shit up.
Maybe I use FB differently than other people, but after I found my friends and barring the occasional vanity search, I don't search at all.
(PS. I AM one of those marketing people, just not a, you know, an evil one.)
I bet search volume on FB is getting close to Google.com, and this is not even core business for FB.
You spend WAAAAAAAAAY too much time on Facebook if your perspective on their share of the internet search market is that narrow.
Facebook, as of February, was sitting at 700 status updates a second. Know how many google searches were made every second as of February? 34,000.
So no, not close. Not even close to close.