So kick off the people abusing their terms of service. Suing the company making the bot is a completely different issue, and has (rather, SHOULD have) no legal grounds.
As I understand it, the glider works along the lines of Expect (of Rogomatic fame), so there was very little they could do towards banning the glider users.
The vast majority of their customers despise bots and they had to do something. I disagree with how they ended up doing it, but make no mistake, a bot-less WoW is a much better WoW.
WoW is a multi-player game. Glider creates an unfair advantage as well as being outside the established rules.
I'd offer a compromise for the Glider users. What would you say if Blizzard established a single realm where Glider was legal under their terms of service? Would that satisfy you and would you be happy only "competing" against other Glider users and people who had explicitly given their permission to game in a bot realm?
You have to remember that Blizzard has the entire community to worry about here, and if they find something that gives an unfair advantage they are completely within their right to ban it.
Now that's +5 insightful and EXACTLY correct.
We of the WoW community are applauding the end of glider.
As far as I'm concerned, people who pay for a copy of their game software have *every* right to opt to use said software with other, alternate servers, if they so desire.
I have some unfortunate direct experience with that. My wife accessed a private server with her legal WoW account. What happened after she connected to a Blizzard server was that the characters who were created on the private server were summarily deleted. The account was not banned, nor was I (it's my name on the account) censured in any way.
So apparently you DO have a "right" to play on a private server, just stay there once you've done it.
They also have every right to run any manner of automated script or "bot" in lieu of physically sitting in front of their screen and hand-manipulating the character they've paid for the subscription to use on Blizzard's servers!
That does not follow. I have a right to smoke cigarettes at home. I do not have a right to smoke inside the office at work. I think that's silly, but it's still the law of the land.
Elune be praised that I can smoke while I'm flying commercial on a hippogryph in the old world.
Or imagine if you bought the latest edition of a "Call of Duty" game, only to find out the EULA stated it was illegal to play except on weekends? Blizzard has effectively won the legal ability for developers to state and enforce anything like this they'd like to put in the agreement!
Puhleeeze! WoW hasn't kept growing, 12 million active accounts now, by pissing their customers off.
Really guys. +5 insightful? NOT! This is -1 flamebait.
Basically he said that since Warden controls access to certain parts of the game by checking for software that accesses these parts in an unapproved manner, and Glider attempts to bypass these checks, the DMCA applies.
Interesting. The way you word that makes it sound like the same principle could be applied to root kits or viruses on Microsoft Windows.
Obviously Blizzard doesn't like this because they want you to pay for your monthly account for several months while you grind and occasionally do interesting things, rather than level up quickly (from a real life time line perspective) and spend less time doing more fun things.
Considering that the number of active accounts has passed 12 million, I would say there are a fair amount of people who find the game interesting.
I mouse clicked for every point of my maxed fishing skill, I mouse clicked for every bit of stuff I've looted off corpses. Doing that sort of stuff by 'bot degrades the things I earned by playing. It's not as if it is a difficult game and it's getting easier all the time.
I'm happy that Blizzard is actively going after cheats. Not so happy with the way they went about getting this one. But certainly not unhappy enough to close my accounts.
10,000 is just as arbitrary a figure as 1,000. If it went back 10,000 years, you'd insist on 20,000 years, or 100,000. You haven't looked at the models and worked out how many years of data we need to get decent figures out.
That's still off by at least an order of magnitude. The earth is something like 4.5 billion years old and ice age cycles are something like 100,000 years in duration.
I have a BIG problem with people saying "(hot|cold)est year on record" when accurate records just do not go very far back.
Jimmy Carter. Maybe not all that effective, but honest and decent.
For someone who was touted as an intelligent man, saying the office was too big for one man to occupy during a campaign was daft. Part of leadership ability is the ability to delegate responsibility. Besides, it was his administration that laid the seeds of last year's crash.
I will respect Carter though for the admission in his (in)famous Playboy interview regarding "lusting in his heart". That took a lot of guts for a politician to say and I actually believe him.
I don't really see why that's a failure of logic. Her point seems to be that, look we've pushed it to the point it's going to happen, let's not make it even worse.
It was "scientifically" proven around the turn of the 20th century that heavier than air flight was impossible. A few years later, the Wright Brothers demonstrated how to do it.
The number one input into our ecosystem is from the Sun. All others are orders of magnitude less. Ignore that at the peril of your credibility to future generations.
"According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 25,000 people died of starvation every day in 2003" - Wikipedia article on starvation.
On a scale of 0 to 10, low to high, I would rank the UN about 3[1] and Wikipedia 0 as reputable sources.
I've *lived* in the 3rd world for half a decade and there's no way that number is even close. So what is your point?
People live, people die. The leading cause of death in the world is government (war, etc.).
[1] The UN only gets that highly ranked because they were honest enough to publish a study reporting NO statistical dangers from so-called second hand smoke. They retracted it later. Sigh.
There is a myth that they predicted all apocalyptic shit in the 20th century. I remember when Limits came out.... its predictions were aimed squarely at the early to mid 21st century.
That was not what they were teaching in schools 20 years ago. Oil was supposed to have run out about 1997 or 1998 and tin 1990ish.
Oopsy!
Oh wait! We *did* already run out of oil out of the ground and all of today's oil production comes from extraction from teenager's faces![1] How could I be so dumb?
[1] Who would have thunk that Mel Brooks could save the world?
I think they were right (about the coming ice age).
During the "mini ice age" 300 years ago, the notable feature was the lack of sunspots. Guess what the latest photos of the Sun show - NO sunspots.
Temperatures have also been going down, not up recently.
Analogy time. If you're trying to optimize code for speed you want to work on the region of code where you're spending the most time in already. It's the same as with temperature on the earth. The biggest input is the Sun. If the Sun cools down, as it apparently does periodically (periodic ice ages are fairly well documented and proven), then things get colder.
If one was *really* concerned about Global Warming, one would want a thermostat applied to the Sun. No one has suggested that. I find it remarkable the Sun stays as consistent as it does.
Anyway, the Sun is a first order effect, and anything man-made is at best several orders beneath that. We have more to worry about if the Sun suddenly becomes unstable and goes nova than this so-called Global Warming.
I'll leave it to someone else to provide a car analogy.
Which is why it is insane on planning on new tech coming
Well, at least you got some terminally stupid people to mod you up. Good job.
We do all kinds of things today considered impossible in earlier times. The one I think about the most is the scientist who proved heavier than air flight was impossible, or maybe the patent clerk who quit from the US Patent office over a century ago because Everything Had Been Invented already.
When we're[1] set free to invent things, we can do extraordinary things. I view events of the last 3 or 4 decades as more of a problem of declining freedom than anything else. The 50s and 60s were an exciting time of exponential technological progress.
Fortunately for me, I grew up in the 60s and when they thought I was brain damaged and slow, my mother helped me read astronomy books from the library and I got interested in the space program. Today, they would probably just fill me full of drugs. I've heard too many horror stories to ever let my sons set foot near a US public school.
You can always adapt your planning if a new tech comes up.
Well, sure, but the thing is, we used to invent those all the time. Still do, when we're given half a chance. The human mind is a most amazing thing.
A bit OT, but I would suggest you install the KDE apps you like, and then install...
(Speaking only for myself, as one who greatly prefers KDE 3.5 to 4.x).
I like the way the Window Manager works. For all the years I worked in Japan, I was always able to configure KDE in a Japanese locale even though I have poor fluency in many of the characters used in technical language. KDE4[1] is difficult to configure in English.
XEmacs 21.5 is being distributed in current Linux distros too and that is rather a mistake, for the same reason.
To try to bring this on-topic, is that what Microsoft Windows XP lovers feel about Microsoft Vista?
[1] I've only used KDE4 in the context of a notebook running Fedora 9. I'm disappointed, but I do not use that machine often enough that I am interested in switching it to GNOME.
At this point in time, the amount of effort invested in developing the Microsoft Windows kernel[1] and the Linux kernel dwarf OS/360. I would very much like to see parallel works for both of those projects.
When I was first reading about Microsoft Vista I was wondering when they were going to start going up against Brooks' Law. There comes a point with every piece of group-developed software that you just need to rewrite the bloody thing from scratch. That point seems to come a lot sooner with proprietary software[2].
Speaking only from my personal experience, when you work on a piece of software out of passion, out of making something work to do *everything* you want it to do, you tend to continue until it does so. If you're only being paid to work on it, when the pay ends, you stop and move on to something else. Unless anyone else speaks up about prior art, I'm going to call that "Steve's Law".
[1] I admit that's a wild guess on my part, but considering how much more powerful modern equipment is, it has to be correct.
[2] In my experience. And I'll be objective and say that XEmacs development was hampered the same way by being initially developed by Lucid.
"Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
Like those of us who voted for President Bush the first time to reverse the previous administration's policies (but really didn't), when will the Obama guys get frustrated when he fails to end the so-called "Patriot" Act and warrantless wiretapping which he supposedly opposed?
He will not, because the "Patriot" Act was composed in pieces by the Bush I/Clinton administrations. He already caved on the warrantless wiretapping so that's already a done deal.
You're seriously comparing the CDA and the DMCA to the likes of the Iraq War,
The CDA was attached to the Telecom Bill that directly led to the Telecom crash. There's certainly bipartisan blame for that one, Republicans may have pushed it through the House and Senate, but impeached ex-President Clinton signed it.
Both groups that the US ended up going to war with in Afghanistan and Iraq had been originally funded by previous administrations (to bipartisan support as the Republicans did not have enough votes to get any bills through congress at the time).
The war in Iraq I agree was petty and a mistake. Son wants to make good on Daddy's mistake. It hasn't turned out as badly as Vietnam did... yet, but give the current administration some time...
... and staffing every position with hacks and cronies? Repubs are demonstrably worse for our country.
You must be new here. Bush did the stacking thing a bit less than the previous administration. but that sort of thing is Politics As Usual.
I will not comment on Katrina, there was too much disaster going on where I was living at the time that was being handled quite badly. Hey, I like living on the ring of fire which is subject to earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires (thank you Greenies in CA!) and typhoons depending upon which part you're in. Does that mean I should expect the government to bail me out because I enjoy this part of the world?
I don't buy this "Oh, they're all bad, Dems are just as bad" meme. It's just not factually true.
Let me see if I understand this correctly then. If you write a fan article for a local games magazine and get paid $25 (or pay someone who writes for a local games magazine under the table[1]) to mention your game, that makes it a credible source?
Under that criteria, you should delete all writing in Wikipedia that was unpaid, if unpaid for writings are not valid references.
Sheesh. And you wikipedians wonder why people do not take you seriously.
[1] Providing free copies of software and hardware and other goodies in exchange for "reviews" has been an industry standard for decades.
If you're targeting WSJ, that indeed may be setting the bar too high, but how about impressing a local game magazine instead, as they generally tend to pay attention to more marginal topics than the big media?
How is doing that any different than setting up a website saying the same thing?
Sheesh. And you wikipedians wonder why people do not take you seriously.
They should appreciate Microsoft more than they do. If Linux had a more dominant position in the market, Linux users would be cleaning spyware/malware from their machines too. But most linux users are too smart to realize or admit that.
That's an extraordinarily ignorant comment. The kind of stuff that spreads viruses and worms was discredited in the Unix world over two decades ago. Do not execute foreign code coming from a wire. It was Microsoft who ignored history and best practice and "innovated" it. The idiots at Netscape share secondary blame in innovating the idiotic Javascript.
Slashdot Mirror
So kick off the people abusing their terms of service. Suing the company making the bot is a completely different issue, and has (rather, SHOULD have) no legal grounds.
As I understand it, the glider works along the lines of Expect (of Rogomatic fame), so there was very little they could do towards banning the glider users.
The vast majority of their customers despise bots and they had to do something. I disagree with how they ended up doing it, but make no mistake, a bot-less WoW is a much better WoW.
WoW is a multi-player game. Glider creates an unfair advantage as well as being outside the established rules.
I'd offer a compromise for the Glider users. What would you say if Blizzard established a single realm where Glider was legal under their terms of service? Would that satisfy you and would you be happy only "competing" against other Glider users and people who had explicitly given their permission to game in a bot realm?
Isn't that kinda like suing Smith & Wesson because people get shot?
You may take my Nesingwary 4000 only from my cold dead hands.
You have to remember that Blizzard has the entire community to worry about here, and if they find something that gives an unfair advantage they are completely within their right to ban it.
Now that's +5 insightful and EXACTLY correct.
We of the WoW community are applauding the end of glider.
As far as I'm concerned, people who pay for a copy of their game software have *every* right to opt to use said software with other, alternate servers, if they so desire.
I have some unfortunate direct experience with that. My wife accessed a private server with her legal WoW account. What happened after she connected to a Blizzard server was that the characters who were created on the private server were summarily deleted. The account was not banned, nor was I (it's my name on the account) censured in any way.
So apparently you DO have a "right" to play on a private server, just stay there once you've done it.
They also have every right to run any manner of automated script or "bot" in lieu of physically sitting in front of their screen and hand-manipulating the character they've paid for the subscription to use on Blizzard's servers!
That does not follow. I have a right to smoke cigarettes at home. I do not have a right to smoke inside the office at work. I think that's silly, but it's still the law of the land.
Elune be praised that I can smoke while I'm flying commercial on a hippogryph in the old world.
Or imagine if you bought the latest edition of a "Call of Duty" game, only to find out the EULA stated it was illegal to play except on weekends? Blizzard has effectively won the legal ability for developers to state and enforce anything like this they'd like to put in the agreement!
Puhleeeze! WoW hasn't kept growing, 12 million active accounts now, by pissing their customers off.
Really guys. +5 insightful? NOT! This is -1 flamebait.
Basically he said that since Warden controls access to certain parts of the game by checking for software that accesses these parts in an unapproved manner, and Glider attempts to bypass these checks, the DMCA applies.
Interesting. The way you word that makes it sound like the same principle could be applied to root kits or viruses on Microsoft Windows.
That 70% seems pretty much willing to deal with the spam.
I've probably seen as much gold spam *total* since they added the insta-report button than I used to see in a day.
I recall being disappointed that that was all they could come up with when it was first introduced, but it has done an amazingly good job.
Never played WoW
Oh good, an expert opinion coming up here ...
Obviously Blizzard doesn't like this because they want you to pay for your monthly account for several months while you grind and occasionally do interesting things, rather than level up quickly (from a real life time line perspective) and spend less time doing more fun things.
Considering that the number of active accounts has passed 12 million, I would say there are a fair amount of people who find the game interesting.
I mouse clicked for every point of my maxed fishing skill, I mouse clicked for every bit of stuff I've looted off corpses. Doing that sort of stuff by 'bot degrades the things I earned by playing. It's not as if it is a difficult game and it's getting easier all the time.
I'm happy that Blizzard is actively going after cheats. Not so happy with the way they went about getting this one. But certainly not unhappy enough to close my accounts.
10,000 is just as arbitrary a figure as 1,000. If it went back 10,000 years, you'd insist on 20,000 years, or 100,000. You haven't looked at the models and worked out how many years of data we need to get decent figures out.
That's still off by at least an order of magnitude. The earth is something like 4.5 billion years old and ice age cycles are something like 100,000 years in duration.
I have a BIG problem with people saying "(hot|cold)est year on record" when accurate records just do not go very far back.
References:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/03_1.shtml
Jimmy Carter. Maybe not all that effective, but honest and decent.
For someone who was touted as an intelligent man, saying the office was too big for one man to occupy during a campaign was daft. Part of leadership ability is the ability to delegate responsibility. Besides, it was his administration that laid the seeds of last year's crash.
I will respect Carter though for the admission in his (in)famous Playboy interview regarding "lusting in his heart". That took a lot of guts for a politician to say and I actually believe him.
Damn whales exhaling in our oceans.
The methane (a greenhouse gas) in our atmosphere is nearly all from cow farts.
I don't really see why that's a failure of logic. Her point seems to be that, look we've pushed it to the point it's going to happen, let's not make it even worse.
It was "scientifically" proven around the turn of the 20th century that heavier than air flight was impossible. A few years later, the Wright Brothers demonstrated how to do it.
The number one input into our ecosystem is from the Sun. All others are orders of magnitude less. Ignore that at the peril of your credibility to future generations.
The easiest process is to just leave the carbon as carbon in the first place, but we seem to be unable to handle even that.
Every breath you take you exhale carbon dioxide. So, show us how it goes big guy - leave carbon as carbon and stop breathing.
I'm not a global warming denier
"Global warming denier"? Are people actually using that term?
If one disagrees with the dogma of the day, that makes one a "denier"? Sigh. Political correctness has gotten way out of hand.
"According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 25,000 people died of starvation every day in 2003" - Wikipedia article on starvation.
On a scale of 0 to 10, low to high, I would rank the UN about 3[1] and Wikipedia 0 as reputable sources.
I've *lived* in the 3rd world for half a decade and there's no way that number is even close. So what is your point?
People live, people die. The leading cause of death in the world is government (war, etc.).
[1] The UN only gets that highly ranked because they were honest enough to publish a study reporting NO statistical dangers from so-called second hand smoke. They retracted it later. Sigh.
There is a myth that they predicted all apocalyptic shit in the 20th century. I remember when Limits came out .... its predictions were aimed squarely at the early to mid 21st century.
That was not what they were teaching in schools 20 years ago. Oil was supposed to have run out about 1997 or 1998 and tin 1990ish.
Oopsy!
Oh wait! We *did* already run out of oil out of the ground and all of today's oil production comes from extraction from teenager's faces![1] How could I be so dumb?
[1] Who would have thunk that Mel Brooks could save the world?
I think they were right (about the coming ice age).
During the "mini ice age" 300 years ago, the notable feature was the lack of sunspots. Guess what the latest photos of the Sun show - NO sunspots.
Temperatures have also been going down, not up recently.
Analogy time. If you're trying to optimize code for speed you want to work on the region of code where you're spending the most time in already. It's the same as with temperature on the earth. The biggest input is the Sun. If the Sun cools down, as it apparently does periodically (periodic ice ages are fairly well documented and proven), then things get colder.
If one was *really* concerned about Global Warming, one would want a thermostat applied to the Sun. No one has suggested that. I find it remarkable the Sun stays as consistent as it does.
Anyway, the Sun is a first order effect, and anything man-made is at best several orders beneath that. We have more to worry about if the Sun suddenly becomes unstable and goes nova than this so-called Global Warming.
I'll leave it to someone else to provide a car analogy.
Which is why it is insane on planning on new tech coming
Well, at least you got some terminally stupid people to mod you up. Good job.
We do all kinds of things today considered impossible in earlier times. The one I think about the most is the scientist who proved heavier than air flight was impossible, or maybe the patent clerk who quit from the US Patent office over a century ago because Everything Had Been Invented already.
When we're[1] set free to invent things, we can do extraordinary things. I view events of the last 3 or 4 decades as more of a problem of declining freedom than anything else. The 50s and 60s were an exciting time of exponential technological progress.
Fortunately for me, I grew up in the 60s and when they thought I was brain damaged and slow, my mother helped me read astronomy books from the library and I got interested in the space program. Today, they would probably just fill me full of drugs. I've heard too many horror stories to ever let my sons set foot near a US public school.
You can always adapt your planning if a new tech comes up.
Well, sure, but the thing is, we used to invent those all the time. Still do, when we're given half a chance. The human mind is a most amazing thing.
[1] "We" as in humans in general.
A bit OT, but I would suggest you install the KDE apps you like, and then install ...
(Speaking only for myself, as one who greatly prefers KDE 3.5 to 4.x).
I like the way the Window Manager works. For all the years I worked in Japan, I was always able to configure KDE in a Japanese locale even though I have poor fluency in many of the characters used in technical language. KDE4[1] is difficult to configure in English.
XEmacs 21.5 is being distributed in current Linux distros too and that is rather a mistake, for the same reason.
To try to bring this on-topic, is that what Microsoft Windows XP lovers feel about Microsoft Vista?
[1] I've only used KDE4 in the context of a notebook running Fedora 9. I'm disappointed, but I do not use that machine often enough that I am interested in switching it to GNOME.
the always underestimated effect of Brooks' Law.
At this point in time, the amount of effort invested in developing the Microsoft Windows kernel[1] and the Linux kernel dwarf OS/360. I would very much like to see parallel works for both of those projects.
When I was first reading about Microsoft Vista I was wondering when they were going to start going up against Brooks' Law. There comes a point with every piece of group-developed software that you just need to rewrite the bloody thing from scratch. That point seems to come a lot sooner with proprietary software[2].
Speaking only from my personal experience, when you work on a piece of software out of passion, out of making something work to do *everything* you want it to do, you tend to continue until it does so. If you're only being paid to work on it, when the pay ends, you stop and move on to something else. Unless anyone else speaks up about prior art, I'm going to call that "Steve's Law".
[1] I admit that's a wild guess on my part, but considering how much more powerful modern equipment is, it has to be correct.
[2] In my experience. And I'll be objective and say that XEmacs development was hampered the same way by being initially developed by Lucid.
Controlled Bot Net of over 250,000.
I prefer the way TFA put it: "...wielded a 250,000-strong bot army."
Directed and managed 250k node network.
"Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
Like those of us who voted for President Bush the first time to reverse the previous administration's policies (but really didn't), when will the Obama guys get frustrated when he fails to end the so-called "Patriot" Act and warrantless wiretapping which he supposedly opposed?
He will not, because the "Patriot" Act was composed in pieces by the Bush I/Clinton administrations. He already caved on the warrantless wiretapping so that's already a done deal.
You're seriously comparing the CDA and the DMCA to the likes of the Iraq War,
The CDA was attached to the Telecom Bill that directly led to the Telecom crash. There's certainly bipartisan blame for that one, Republicans may have pushed it through the House and Senate, but impeached ex-President Clinton signed it.
Both groups that the US ended up going to war with in Afghanistan and Iraq had been originally funded by previous administrations (to bipartisan support as the Republicans did not have enough votes to get any bills through congress at the time).
The war in Iraq I agree was petty and a mistake. Son wants to make good on Daddy's mistake. It hasn't turned out as badly as Vietnam did ... yet, but give the current administration some time ...
... and staffing every position with hacks and cronies? Repubs are demonstrably worse for our country.
You must be new here. Bush did the stacking thing a bit less than the previous administration. but that sort of thing is Politics As Usual.
I will not comment on Katrina, there was too much disaster going on where I was living at the time that was being handled quite badly. Hey, I like living on the ring of fire which is subject to earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires (thank you Greenies in CA!) and typhoons depending upon which part you're in. Does that mean I should expect the government to bail me out because I enjoy this part of the world?
I don't buy this "Oh, they're all bad, Dems are just as bad" meme. It's just not factually true.
Hmmm, maybe you *were* born yesterday.
We haven't had an honest and decent President[1] in over a century http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/williamhowardtaft/ and few people today seem inclined to crack history books. I'm not surprised there's so much ignorance.
[1] Of couse, the reward for being an honest and decent President is retirement after 4 years, sigh.
Let me see if I understand this correctly then. If you write a fan article for a local games magazine and get paid $25 (or pay someone who writes for a local games magazine under the table[1]) to mention your game, that makes it a credible source?
Under that criteria, you should delete all writing in Wikipedia that was unpaid, if unpaid for writings are not valid references.
Sheesh. And you wikipedians wonder why people do not take you seriously.
[1] Providing free copies of software and hardware and other goodies in exchange for "reviews" has been an industry standard for decades.
If you're targeting WSJ, that indeed may be setting the bar too high, but how about impressing a local game magazine instead, as they generally tend to pay attention to more marginal topics than the big media?
How is doing that any different than setting up a website saying the same thing?
Sheesh. And you wikipedians wonder why people do not take you seriously.
They should appreciate Microsoft more than they do. If Linux had a more dominant position in the market, Linux users would be cleaning spyware/malware from their machines too. But most linux users are too smart to realize or admit that.
That's an extraordinarily ignorant comment. The kind of stuff that spreads viruses and worms was discredited in the Unix world over two decades ago. Do not execute foreign code coming from a wire. It was Microsoft who ignored history and best practice and "innovated" it. The idiots at Netscape share secondary blame in innovating the idiotic Javascript.