That page isn't too kind to Mozilla either; it increased Moz's memory usage from 26M to 100M using 1.2beta on Linux. But no crashes, and no real slowdown because I have more than enough memory for that.
Yeah, I do that kind of thing too. It really does seem to me like these advertisers have become their own worst enemies: it's like they know that no one cares what is in their ads anymore and are afraid to let us make our own choices anymore.
What they should realize is that the main reason that advertising has declined in effectiveness is partly due to the array of invasive attention grabbers and tracking techniques they have employed, and partly due to the total saturation of the market with worthless and malicious advertising. Advertisers take such a hostile stance these days that people are beginning to despise them.
What should eventually happen is that a major backlash will develop and all the companies that persist in these practices will go out of business. Unfortunately I've come to doubt whether that will happen given the drone mindset of most of my fellow Americans.
Good point. I didn't think about the fact that most of the sites aren't serving their own ads. Strike that from my original statement;)
I stand by my assertion however: I don't think viewing advertising supported content implies any sort of contract to view ads. Advertising exists completely to get my attention and persuade me to buy something from the sponsor. I've decided that I don't like how advertisers who use popups are trying to do that, so I block all their ads without even viewing them. It makes no difference if I make the decision to ignore their ad before or after viewing it, because I intentionally ignore all popups.
The main problem I have with these sites is that they ignore marketplace forces and try to force you to pay attention. My opinion is that popup blocking software is nothing more than a marketplace response to a practice many people find distasteful. A large portion of the Windows users I've oonverted to Mozilla switched because of the popup blocking features. As this becomes more widespread the technique will become unattractive to advertisers due to the smaller audience. I don't like people to force me to do things; popup blocking software is in my opinion simply the market's way of correcting rampant popup use.
Maybe they should just try to learn what their customers want and offer it to them in an unintrusive manner instead of trying to find more and more invasive ways to force ads down our throats.
I understand that you just don't like the idea that people shouldn't have to give something in return for content; and that sites deserve to be paid. That's true, to an extent: if I like a site and choose to pay them for what they offer, then I have no problem with that. I subscribe to several websites that I frequently visit exactly because I feel they deserve to be paid for what they provide me. But, that's MY decision to make, not the site's. I dislike popups because they are like the site is forcing me to look at their ads. I don't want to see your ad unless I choose to do so. To me popups are like stealing my time.
If a site can't survive without pop up ads then they probably aren't a worthwhile site anyway. Alternatively, they can go to a subscription model, and people who want to will pay them.
Lastly, web sites only engage in popup advertising because they can. If everyone had software to block these ads all the sites would stop using them and find some other way to make money. By using such software I'm just making the statement that I think they should make their money some other way that doesn't steal my time and patience.
There is no way they can seriously block source viewing. It's just not going to happen unless we ditch the web we have and go to Microsoft Palladium Web (tm)! This is nothing but an amatuerish hack to exploit UI problems in IE. It doesn't even stop me from viewing the source in Mozilla, which I assume is one of their main "theft" browsers.
And even if they could control the UI of my browser to the point that I couldn't view the source, there's also the browser cache or even packet sniffing to get a hold of their code. If my browser can see it, of course I can. This company will crash and burn.
No, I'm not stealing from them. There is no agreement saying I have to view the website the way they say I have to, and the Web was explictly designed so that publishers could not impose layout decisions upon browsers. I hate all sites that use popups and would never click on a single one out of principle even if I was interested in what they were selling. So I'm saving them bandwidth costs by not loading their ads which I would ignore anyway.
The more advertisers try to saturate our lives with forced advertising, the stronger the backlash will become. What has effectively happened is that due to the sheer number of ads the impact of each individual one has been reduced to near zero. They're really shooting themselves in the foot by using these invasive techniques.
Using Mozilla is not stealing; I see it more as a start to forcing sites to use more reasonable advertising methods by undermining the market for their invasive techniques.
I don't even mind some bias in what I read; hell, Slashdot is very biased (though I happen to agree with most (but not all!) of/.'s leanings...). But Salon went way too far with it. Many of their articles just seemed like flamebait to me, arguing for the sake of promoting the writer's ideology to the exclusion of all logic or sense.
Maybe I'd like Salon more if I were a serious far-lefter, but I'm pretty moderate on most issues. And for that reason I prefer to get my news in a way that is at least somewhat impartial. I mean, I want to be able to still seperate factual content from the writer's bias when I'm reading between the lines, and Salon just makes that difficult because the bias is so extreme. I used to read Salon a lot but it got to the point where I felt like most of the articles contained at least one blatent lie. That was too much and I quit visiting.
Except that outgoing traffic is normally low-bandwidth. When you use a web browser the outbound traffic is very small compared to the inbound traffic. So the only thing that could generate that much outbound traffic is servers, and since most "legitimate" server applications use low numbered ports, we're likely talking about P2P servers. I think that was what your parent poster was implying (though that ratio seems like it's got to be an exaggeration to me).
I disagree. The script kiddy is the one who is a criminal, but the users who fail to maintain their machines are most definitely acting irresponsibly as well. No, it doesn't give a script kiddy the RIGHT to crack you if you don't patch your machine, but you're still stupid not to. People should use some common sense and try to protect themselves, if only so that they aren't a danger to others.
Your argument is like saying it's totally not my fault if I park my unlocked car with the keys in the ignition in a bad part of LA and someone steals it. Sure, that person was doing something wrong, but I'm still a moron to not take any precautions to avoid its theft. It's exactly the same thing here - yes, the script kiddies shoulder the majority of the blame, but if I'm not stupid I will try to protect myself since there is zero chance the script kiddies are going to go away.
In fact, people not maintaining their machines is even worse than this analogy because a cracked machine becomes a weapon against others. That's more akin to an airline failing to take any security precautions and then saying it's completely not their fault when someone hijacks their plane and flys it into a building.
This isn't an either/or question. If people ate less beef we would need less land, period. We wouldn't need much more fertile land because the fertile land that is used for cattle production and feed crops could be converted to vegetable production. We could use the land that isn't good for food crops for nothing and not rape the environment the way we are. The land is not being "wasted" if we aren't extracting every last resource from it.
The cattle industry is perhaps the most environmentally destructive industry on the planet, and we would be better off without them. I like beef but I already don't eat it very often due to the practices of the industry. If everyone at least cut down on it as well we would be better off in many, many ways. Anyone who lives in the West can see how much of the land has been destroyed for cattle ranching, and I'm sure it's even worse in Latin America.
Of course, the issue will eventually be forced upon the market by the long term environmental damage being done. Mark my words, in 50 years beef will be a luxury item due to the wastefullness of its production combined with more limited resources being shared by an expanded population.
That's very true, and there's no way they could ever know conclusively where the resistance first evolved. However, what is likely to be true is that the reason Detroit has these bugs popping up is due to overuse of vancomycin, as is stated in the article. They overused vancomycin more there because the other drugs became resistant sooner than in other areas. The genes for resistance become prevalent in the population of Staph aureus because the drug is being overused and thus a large proportion of the population of germs is being subjected to evolutionary pressure. So, while we can't pinpoint where the resistance started, we can certainly understand why resistance is spreading.
Mozilla's built in mail is actually quite good - comparable to KMail. I used Kmail for a long time but switched so that I could use the same mail client on Windows and Linux. Evolution seems way too much like Outlook to me - and I despise Outlook's interface. Just the memory of supporting Outlook's broken UI at my old job makes me want to shudder.
From what I've read about both IQ tests and the SATs, they are very good predictors of success or failure in specific areas for the bottom and top 15% or so. Meaning, if you score very well or very poorly on one of these tests, there is quite a good chance that you will succeed (or fail fail) academically or in a variety of fields. For the middle 50% type people the coorelation is looser and not such a good predictor of success or failure.
To add to what I just said, I think that IE can be blamed for a good 40-50% of Windows instability now that they've worked out some of the problems with bad drivers. Not a bright move from a technical standpoint to integrate the browser into the OS by spreading its code across half the system and making the entire user interface dependent on an application that processes Web pages.
Yeah, I agree that's strange. I regularly could achieve uptimes of weeks-months on 2k, even with intensive use for 3D games and other things that might utilize buggy drivers. It shouldn't really need to be rebooted ever unless a bad driver (usually) is taking it down (that or the latest MS security fixes...) My guess as to the parent poster's instability is some sort of nasty driver...and that's not really Win2k's fault, considering that the Radeon drivers can easily take down the Linux kernel on my laptop.
I disagree wholeheartedly. 2k has been FAR more stable than XP Pro in my experience. 2k is just about as stable as Linux is, and my applications rarely if ever crashed under it. XP on the other hand has totally locked on me on several occasions and frequently causes applications to crash...the same applications that never crashed under 2k.
That combined with the major speed hit over 2k and the DRM EULAs is enough. MS should've left out the bloat they added to XP...about the only useful new additions are superior Plug and Play and ClearType. Those are not worth the degraded stability and 30% lower performance IMHO.
When I said "security" I was mainly referring to using mod_rewrite in conjunction with mod_referrer, etc. to keep people from directly browsing image directories or editing script parameters right on their URL bar. I know that's not real security since people can hand-construct a GET command to alter that, but it at least makes it more difficult for casual users to do, and it makes the URL look nicer as well.
I don't think you shouldn't be able to use mod_rewrite to alter all your URLs so people can't access things in way you didn't allow. There's nothing legally stopping you from doing that; after all, you own the server. But I do think this is unethical behavior if it is done for some reason other than security. It undermines the reason the Web is a powerful medium and not just clickable television or an electronic magazine. Linking and relinking is at the heart of a peer publishing world where anyone can put their work out there on an equal plane with the professionals and where anyone can comment, criticize, or critique the contents of other people's information.
My view is that when you make a public website you are contributing your views and information to the massive global community of links and related information. This ecosystem feeds off of openness and places the quality of the content above marketing and branding. I think that you should be willing to accept that when you make a public website, unless you are worried you can't compete on merit.
Basically, you're free to make whatever you want available, but you can't control what OTHER people do with that content once it leaves your site (within the bounds of copyright law, which has no bearing IMHO on the copy in the browser cache). That's the price you pay for using the Web to publish: you have to let everyone else have the same rights as you, and that includes the right to link. That's why you shouldn't use mod_rewrite to prevent deep linking, etc, though that's certainly preferable to sending out legal threats. You can do this if you want, but you're not being a responsible member of the Internet community.
You don't, and you don't really have a right to. People can view your content through whatever proxy or filter they want if you put it online at a publically accessible URL. You as a content producer don't get to specify exact presentation.
Re:Nice thought but...
on
Moore's Ants
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· Score: 2
Well, considering that there are hundreds of thousands of known species of things like ants, it might not always be easy to come up with descriptive names for them all. I think this is perfectly acceptable and actually pretty cool as a way to recognize people who have tried to help conservation.
I agree with your point in part, but it's worth noting that I frequently use parts of KDE like its dock applets and applications under Fluxbox since I want to avoid the performance hit that comes from the worst of KDE like konqueror and kicker. It does load some of KDE's shared libraries which imposes something of a performance penalty but nothing like running the whole KDE panel and file managers. So just though I'd point out that you can easily use parts of KDE from another environment (you can even run kicker under Fluxbox, though there's not much point in not just using KDE if you're willing to accept the sluggishness that will bring).
Weight is a measure of force, and when we say that we usually mean the force exerted by the Earth's gravity on an object. I think a lot of the confusion in this thread over whether weight is a measure of force or mass has to do with the fact that weight is often used to mean mass. The reason for this is that within a constant gravitational field, weight is directly proportional to the mass of an object. So, since we are all near the Earth's surface, weight can be used to mean mass since the gravity we all experience while sitting on the Earth's crust is approximately the same.
The problem with the article stating that the ISS weighs 200,000 pounds is that it is not clear if this means the weight on the ground or the weight in orbit. I assume they mean weight on the ground since for many scientifically illiterate Americans pounds == mass.
Also, the weight of the ISS in orbit with respect to the Earth is certainly not zero. The ISS may be several hundred kilometers above the Earth, but this distance is dwarfed by the radius of the planet. The Earth still exerts considerable gravitational pull (ie, weight) on the ISS. The only reason it stays in orbit is that it has a considerable horizontal velocity with respect to the Earth's surface, so it "falls around" the planet rather than just falling down.
Also, the ISS's orbit is continually decaying. I think that this is a result of the weight being slightly larger than is compensated for by the horizontal velocity, in combination with friction from some gas that is present at that altitude. That's why they have to boost it to a higher orbit every now and then.
Plus I'm glad that they are still actively patching a game that has been out as long as that. Many other companies would just ditch the users and move on to their new projects. And it's not like Blizzard games are any more bug-ridden than most. I mean, Starcraft was rock solid from the beginning for me, as least as far as stability.
Contrast this with Tribes2, where it literally took me two days of tweaking my Win2k machine for arcane chipset issues in order to get it to run with any measure of stability (and it took me an hour or so to get it to run at all). I don't remember what happened exactly but I believe that when the company that made it was sold they replaced the dev team and thus lost the ability to fix the issues that MANY users were experiencing. That could have been a really cool game but it was definitely released before it was done.
Slashdot Mirror
That page isn't too kind to Mozilla either; it increased Moz's memory usage from 26M to 100M using 1.2beta on Linux. But no crashes, and no real slowdown because I have more than enough memory for that.
Yeah, I do that kind of thing too. It really does seem to me like these advertisers have become their own worst enemies: it's like they know that no one cares what is in their ads anymore and are afraid to let us make our own choices anymore.
What they should realize is that the main reason that advertising has declined in effectiveness is partly due to the array of invasive attention grabbers and tracking techniques they have employed, and partly due to the total saturation of the market with worthless and malicious advertising. Advertisers take such a hostile stance these days that people are beginning to despise them.
What should eventually happen is that a major backlash will develop and all the companies that persist in these practices will go out of business. Unfortunately I've come to doubt whether that will happen given the drone mindset of most of my fellow Americans.
Good point. I didn't think about the fact that most of the sites aren't serving their own ads. Strike that from my original statement ;)
I stand by my assertion however: I don't think viewing advertising supported content implies any sort of contract to view ads. Advertising exists completely to get my attention and persuade me to buy something from the sponsor. I've decided that I don't like how advertisers who use popups are trying to do that, so I block all their ads without even viewing them. It makes no difference if I make the decision to ignore their ad before or after viewing it, because I intentionally ignore all popups.
The main problem I have with these sites is that they ignore marketplace forces and try to force you to pay attention. My opinion is that popup blocking software is nothing more than a marketplace response to a practice many people find distasteful. A large portion of the Windows users I've oonverted to Mozilla switched because of the popup blocking features. As this becomes more widespread the technique will become unattractive to advertisers due to the smaller audience. I don't like people to force me to do things; popup blocking software is in my opinion simply the market's way of correcting rampant popup use.
Maybe they should just try to learn what their customers want and offer it to them in an unintrusive manner instead of trying to find more and more invasive ways to force ads down our throats.
I understand that you just don't like the idea that people shouldn't have to give something in return for content; and that sites deserve to be paid. That's true, to an extent: if I like a site and choose to pay them for what they offer, then I have no problem with that. I subscribe to several websites that I frequently visit exactly because I feel they deserve to be paid for what they provide me. But, that's MY decision to make, not the site's. I dislike popups because they are like the site is forcing me to look at their ads. I don't want to see your ad unless I choose to do so. To me popups are like stealing my time.
If a site can't survive without pop up ads then they probably aren't a worthwhile site anyway. Alternatively, they can go to a subscription model, and people who want to will pay them.
Lastly, web sites only engage in popup advertising because they can. If everyone had software to block these ads all the sites would stop using them and find some other way to make money. By using such software I'm just making the statement that I think they should make their money some other way that doesn't steal my time and patience.
There is no way they can seriously block source viewing. It's just not going to happen unless we ditch the web we have and go to Microsoft Palladium Web (tm)! This is nothing but an amatuerish hack to exploit UI problems in IE. It doesn't even stop me from viewing the source in Mozilla, which I assume is one of their main "theft" browsers.
And even if they could control the UI of my browser to the point that I couldn't view the source, there's also the browser cache or even packet sniffing to get a hold of their code. If my browser can see it, of course I can. This company will crash and burn.
No, I'm not stealing from them. There is no agreement saying I have to view the website the way they say I have to, and the Web was explictly designed so that publishers could not impose layout decisions upon browsers. I hate all sites that use popups and would never click on a single one out of principle even if I was interested in what they were selling. So I'm saving them bandwidth costs by not loading their ads which I would ignore anyway.
The more advertisers try to saturate our lives with forced advertising, the stronger the backlash will become. What has effectively happened is that due to the sheer number of ads the impact of each individual one has been reduced to near zero. They're really shooting themselves in the foot by using these invasive techniques.
Using Mozilla is not stealing; I see it more as a start to forcing sites to use more reasonable advertising methods by undermining the market for their invasive techniques.
I don't even mind some bias in what I read; hell, Slashdot is very biased (though I happen to agree with most (but not all!) of /.'s leanings...). But Salon went way too far with it. Many of their articles just seemed like flamebait to me, arguing for the sake of promoting the writer's ideology to the exclusion of all logic or sense.
Maybe I'd like Salon more if I were a serious far-lefter, but I'm pretty moderate on most issues. And for that reason I prefer to get my news in a way that is at least somewhat impartial. I mean, I want to be able to still seperate factual content from the writer's bias when I'm reading between the lines, and Salon just makes that difficult because the bias is so extreme. I used to read Salon a lot but it got to the point where I felt like most of the articles contained at least one blatent lie. That was too much and I quit visiting.
Except that outgoing traffic is normally low-bandwidth. When you use a web browser the outbound traffic is very small compared to the inbound traffic. So the only thing that could generate that much outbound traffic is servers, and since most "legitimate" server applications use low numbered ports, we're likely talking about P2P servers. I think that was what your parent poster was implying (though that ratio seems like it's got to be an exaggeration to me).
I disagree. The script kiddy is the one who is a criminal, but the users who fail to maintain their machines are most definitely acting irresponsibly as well. No, it doesn't give a script kiddy the RIGHT to crack you if you don't patch your machine, but you're still stupid not to. People should use some common sense and try to protect themselves, if only so that they aren't a danger to others.
Your argument is like saying it's totally not my fault if I park my unlocked car with the keys in the ignition in a bad part of LA and someone steals it. Sure, that person was doing something wrong, but I'm still a moron to not take any precautions to avoid its theft. It's exactly the same thing here - yes, the script kiddies shoulder the majority of the blame, but if I'm not stupid I will try to protect myself since there is zero chance the script kiddies are going to go away.
In fact, people not maintaining their machines is even worse than this analogy because a cracked machine becomes a weapon against others. That's more akin to an airline failing to take any security precautions and then saying it's completely not their fault when someone hijacks their plane and flys it into a building.
This isn't an either/or question. If people ate less beef we would need less land, period. We wouldn't need much more fertile land because the fertile land that is used for cattle production and feed crops could be converted to vegetable production. We could use the land that isn't good for food crops for nothing and not rape the environment the way we are. The land is not being "wasted" if we aren't extracting every last resource from it.
The cattle industry is perhaps the most environmentally destructive industry on the planet, and we would be better off without them. I like beef but I already don't eat it very often due to the practices of the industry. If everyone at least cut down on it as well we would be better off in many, many ways. Anyone who lives in the West can see how much of the land has been destroyed for cattle ranching, and I'm sure it's even worse in Latin America.
Of course, the issue will eventually be forced upon the market by the long term environmental damage being done. Mark my words, in 50 years beef will be a luxury item due to the wastefullness of its production combined with more limited resources being shared by an expanded population.
That's very true, and there's no way they could ever know conclusively where the resistance first evolved. However, what is likely to be true is that the reason Detroit has these bugs popping up is due to overuse of vancomycin, as is stated in the article. They overused vancomycin more there because the other drugs became resistant sooner than in other areas. The genes for resistance become prevalent in the population of Staph aureus because the drug is being overused and thus a large proportion of the population of germs is being subjected to evolutionary pressure. So, while we can't pinpoint where the resistance started, we can certainly understand why resistance is spreading.
Mozilla's built in mail is actually quite good - comparable to KMail. I used Kmail for a long time but switched so that I could use the same mail client on Windows and Linux. Evolution seems way too much like Outlook to me - and I despise Outlook's interface. Just the memory of supporting Outlook's broken UI at my old job makes me want to shudder.
PGP compresses files during the encryption process.
From what I've read about both IQ tests and the SATs, they are very good predictors of success or failure in specific areas for the bottom and top 15% or so. Meaning, if you score very well or very poorly on one of these tests, there is quite a good chance that you will succeed (or fail fail) academically or in a variety of fields. For the middle 50% type people the coorelation is looser and not such a good predictor of success or failure.
To add to what I just said, I think that IE can be blamed for a good 40-50% of Windows instability now that they've worked out some of the problems with bad drivers. Not a bright move from a technical standpoint to integrate the browser into the OS by spreading its code across half the system and making the entire user interface dependent on an application that processes Web pages.
Yeah, I agree that's strange. I regularly could achieve uptimes of weeks-months on 2k, even with intensive use for 3D games and other things that might utilize buggy drivers. It shouldn't really need to be rebooted ever unless a bad driver (usually) is taking it down (that or the latest MS security fixes...) My guess as to the parent poster's instability is some sort of nasty driver...and that's not really Win2k's fault, considering that the Radeon drivers can easily take down the Linux kernel on my laptop.
I was also referring to IE, mainly. I'm aware of compatibility mode, but it didn't seem to solve some of the trouble I had with other applications.
I disagree wholeheartedly. 2k has been FAR more stable than XP Pro in my experience. 2k is just about as stable as Linux is, and my applications rarely if ever crashed under it. XP on the other hand has totally locked on me on several occasions and frequently causes applications to crash...the same applications that never crashed under 2k.
That combined with the major speed hit over 2k and the DRM EULAs is enough. MS should've left out the bloat they added to XP...about the only useful new additions are superior Plug and Play and ClearType. Those are not worth the degraded stability and 30% lower performance IMHO.
When I said "security" I was mainly referring to using mod_rewrite in conjunction with mod_referrer, etc. to keep people from directly browsing image directories or editing script parameters right on their URL bar. I know that's not real security since people can hand-construct a GET command to alter that, but it at least makes it more difficult for casual users to do, and it makes the URL look nicer as well.
I don't think you shouldn't be able to use mod_rewrite to alter all your URLs so people can't access things in way you didn't allow. There's nothing legally stopping you from doing that; after all, you own the server. But I do think this is unethical behavior if it is done for some reason other than security. It undermines the reason the Web is a powerful medium and not just clickable television or an electronic magazine. Linking and relinking is at the heart of a peer publishing world where anyone can put their work out there on an equal plane with the professionals and where anyone can comment, criticize, or critique the contents of other people's information.
My view is that when you make a public website you are contributing your views and information to the massive global community of links and related information. This ecosystem feeds off of openness and places the quality of the content above marketing and branding. I think that you should be willing to accept that when you make a public website, unless you are worried you can't compete on merit.
Basically, you're free to make whatever you want available, but you can't control what OTHER people do with that content once it leaves your site (within the bounds of copyright law, which has no bearing IMHO on the copy in the browser cache). That's the price you pay for using the Web to publish: you have to let everyone else have the same rights as you, and that includes the right to link. That's why you shouldn't use mod_rewrite to prevent deep linking, etc, though that's certainly preferable to sending out legal threats. You can do this if you want, but you're not being a responsible member of the Internet community.
You don't, and you don't really have a right to. People can view your content through whatever proxy or filter they want if you put it online at a publically accessible URL. You as a content producer don't get to specify exact presentation.
Well, considering that there are hundreds of thousands of known species of things like ants, it might not always be easy to come up with descriptive names for them all. I think this is perfectly acceptable and actually pretty cool as a way to recognize people who have tried to help conservation.
I agree with your point in part, but it's worth noting that I frequently use parts of KDE like its dock applets and applications under Fluxbox since I want to avoid the performance hit that comes from the worst of KDE like konqueror and kicker. It does load some of KDE's shared libraries which imposes something of a performance penalty but nothing like running the whole KDE panel and file managers. So just though I'd point out that you can easily use parts of KDE from another environment (you can even run kicker under Fluxbox, though there's not much point in not just using KDE if you're willing to accept the sluggishness that will bring).
Weight is a measure of force, and when we say that we usually mean the force exerted by the Earth's gravity on an object. I think a lot of the confusion in this thread over whether weight is a measure of force or mass has to do with the fact that weight is often used to mean mass. The reason for this is that within a constant gravitational field, weight is directly proportional to the mass of an object. So, since we are all near the Earth's surface, weight can be used to mean mass since the gravity we all experience while sitting on the Earth's crust is approximately the same.
The problem with the article stating that the ISS weighs 200,000 pounds is that it is not clear if this means the weight on the ground or the weight in orbit. I assume they mean weight on the ground since for many scientifically illiterate Americans pounds == mass.
Also, the weight of the ISS in orbit with respect to the Earth is certainly not zero. The ISS may be several hundred kilometers above the Earth, but this distance is dwarfed by the radius of the planet. The Earth still exerts considerable gravitational pull (ie, weight) on the ISS. The only reason it stays in orbit is that it has a considerable horizontal velocity with respect to the Earth's surface, so it "falls around" the planet rather than just falling down.
Also, the ISS's orbit is continually decaying. I think that this is a result of the weight being slightly larger than is compensated for by the horizontal velocity, in combination with friction from some gas that is present at that altitude. That's why they have to boost it to a higher orbit every now and then.
Plus I'm glad that they are still actively patching a game that has been out as long as that. Many other companies would just ditch the users and move on to their new projects. And it's not like Blizzard games are any more bug-ridden than most. I mean, Starcraft was rock solid from the beginning for me, as least as far as stability.
Contrast this with Tribes2, where it literally took me two days of tweaking my Win2k machine for arcane chipset issues in order to get it to run with any measure of stability (and it took me an hour or so to get it to run at all). I don't remember what happened exactly but I believe that when the company that made it was sold they replaced the dev team and thus lost the ability to fix the issues that MANY users were experiencing. That could have been a really cool game but it was definitely released before it was done.