As long as Blizzard is making money off the auction house I'm not playing D3. I gave them the benefit and bought it once, but there's no way I'm falling for freemium-in-disguise again. I'd much rather pay a monthly fee and have the game actually be balanced correctly. D3 was fun for a while, and had some good innovations, but it also had some glaring flaws and the auction house alone would've overwhelmed any good qualities it had. When there's a profit motive to making the game worse, you can count on a mediocre-at-best product.
Depends where you get your milk. There's a farm pretty close to me that sells milk and you can go see the cows wandering around in a field grazing. They may not be 100% as happy as some theoretical happiest cow, but I find it hard to picture anyone finding a serious problem with it who isn't espousing some extreme fringe ideal of animal freedom and independence.
All of that is to say that someone might be a vegetarian for animal welfare reasons and drink milk from such a place and that would be logically consistent.
My understanding is that greasemonkey adds scripts that modify the page, rather than modifying the incoming javascript, but I don't know much about how it works under the hood, perhaps I'm mistaken. Even so, there is nothing illegal about running greasemonkey or sharing greasemonkey scripts, is there? Which means that changing the license for the page's javascript doesn't add anything from a legal or practical standpoint.
What meaningful freedom? You can't easily take the source, modify it significantly and use it on the site no matter what license they give you. Yeah, you can hack your own library into the page, but who really cares at all about whatever insignificant javascript the government is using to validate their form. I can kind of see making some kind of fuss about obfuscated javascript (because then it's hard to know what your computer is about to do, if you're the paranoid type), but most javascript is only obfuscated by being poorly written. Either that, or it's condensed for very practical reasons of bandwidth conservation.
While it's technically true that content existed before DRM, it's not actually meaningful the way you phrased it.
DRM used to exist in the form of the natural laws of the universe. Copying a book by hand with a pen pretty effectively meant you weren't going to be distributing it very widely. Copying a TV before the advent of the VCR was effectively impossible for almost everyone. Moreover, the inherent physical impediments to copying data was a far more effective form of DRM than anything that exists now. Technology has broken medium-inherent DRM, and now content producers are trying to build it back up in software. That's not meant to be a judgment on whether DRM is good or bad, just pointing out that in the general sense of something that prevents information from getting around, DRM has always existed.
Who is going to certify the chemicals they use for these smells? I barely trust the FDA to certify food additives, I'm not sure Iike the idea of sitting in a movie theatre inhaling whatever chemicals this company found that smells like strawberries and gunpowder.
They also have less market value than a bag of tulip bulbs, at the moment. A bag of tulip bulbs don't come cheap (for most reasonable notions of "a bag of tulip bulbs")
ASL (American Sign Language) is a full-fledged (i.e. forgein) language. You can learn to speak it poorly by just transliterating your english into signs, but it doesn't even use the same word order in all cases. Just signing along with what you say in English doesn't make you fluent in ASL.
Well, if someone is reading a bunch of hate speech I might be made uncomfortable by that. A page with images of cross-burnings and hangings and the like could very well make me uncomfortable to be there. Yet that does not justify censorship. There's lots of things in the world that will be upsetting to someone. Pornography happens to be upsetting to a larger number of US citizens than most things, but, as always, unpopular (and politically dangerous) speech is the only kind that really needs protecting to begin with.
Coming up with the clever algorithm to solve a problem is what is fun
Some important distinctions to make are between coding, design, and production, all of which are parts of the experience. Maybe the point of graphical programming environments isn't only to cater to the pure programming experience you're talking about, but also to give people the opportunity to experience the fun of designing, and seeing their ideas come to life.
As a kid learning BASIC on TRS-80, I did not care in the least about coming up with a clever algorithm. Deciding what to make, creating it and seeing it work was the fun part. For some people, the clever algorithm may indeed be the only fun part of programming, but for me (even now, as an adult and a professional programmer) there is a lot of satisfaction to be had in the design and production parts of the job. Coming up with clever algorithms and solutions definitely is fun, but so are the other parts.
You're essentially arguing that the process itself is all that is, or should matter to people, but I think that misses an important part of any creative enterprise.
Also, as a kid, that sense of "wow, I just made this computer do something it didn't before!" was a pretty rewarding feeling. I think new programmers probably still get some of that.
I'm prepared to believe that the wireless companies do their own gouging of customers, but cramming is about third-parties charging your account. What this settlement aims to do is hold the carriers responsible for those third-party charges. And they should be held responsible, but this isn't quite the same thing as the carriers just charging you random amounts themselves.
I use QT and love it too, but it has some serious drawbacks, from my perspective. The biggest is that it requires a wonky special compilation system. You either have to use the build system they offer (qmake) or you have to manually run their generator yourself (moc - though if you were a masochist you could learn to write out the files moc makes yourself and avoid using it).
I compare every IDE to Eclipse, because that's the best IDE I've seen for any language. But I've never found that CDT, the C++ plugin for Eclipse, is any good. It fails to work out of the box for me and is a pain to configure (but I haven't tried it in a few years). QT Creator, while usable, is really an immature product. There's no support for refactoring, the UI is unintuitive and awkward (for me, at least) and there's lots of little issues with it. Plus you're committed to MingW, which can be a problem depending on what libraries you want to use. Codeblocks is a pretty good IDE, but it doesn't have a QT plugin, so you're left with the problem of dealing with moc files. Visual Studio has a plugin, but it only works with the paid versions.
All of this can be dealt with (and I do) but it's annoying.
Playing sports well does take a lot of mental acuity. Not the same variety that goes into writing good code, but mental acuity all the same. I think it's entirely likely that even if you weren't a physical wreck, you would find it impossible to compete mentally with a professional team-sport athlete in the context of that sporting event.
There's a quality often revered to as "vision" but doesn't actually refer to the athlete's ability to resolve fine detail optically. It refers to having a brain that very quickly sees opportunities, calculates trajectories, and anticipates the movements and intentions of 9-14 other players. If we stuck your brain in a robot body capable of matching their physical abilities, you would still be too stupid (in that domain) to be better than merely good.
Watching sports is another activity entirely, and while some of it certainly is cretinous, jingoism for people with only a couple neurons to rub together, it's entirely possible to be a nerd, an amateur athlete, and to enjoy watching a sport. There are a lot of interesting complexity, strategic decision-making and other highbrow elements even if you disregard the entertainment that is the spectacle of human physical excellence. Personally, I enjoy seeing a guy jump nearly his own height. I think it's neat. I wouldn't watch nothing but that for hours on end, but it seems a little silly to disregard displays of phenomenal ability out of hand.
A lot of people assume that the point of any MMO is to gain levels, items powers and build a character over time, to defeat big monsters, and that anything that detracts from that is bad. Alternatively, you could make a point of a game that isn't about attaching yourself emotionally to some glorified ProgressQuest, and whose interest is the conflict. There's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of the combination of varied builds, fast leveling, player lootings, permanent death, and meaningful in-game factions. Lots of people like quake, and lots of people like MMO style pvp. So what you do is you make a game that combines the interesting aspects of experimenting with a reasonably complex character skillset system, which is something people like about PVP in MMOs, with the action and general painlessness of dieing in Quake.
The other thing wrong with PVP in MMOs is that it is very rarely balanced well. It's often the case that there's either NO pvp or unlimited pvp. A system that allows pvp within a certain power range (as determined by levels, for example) is a way to make it so that PVP doesn't devolve into griefing. Most of the real griefing problems come from letting people of maximum power freely attack those of minimum power. By restricting it within a range that creates at least a reasonable baseline of parity while allowing freedom to fight otherwise, you avoid the stupid kind of pvp which is not fun, and you get a fun style of competition using the RPG style combat mechanics.
I play a mud called carrion fields which works on this model, but it's still a mud (and combines roleplay with the pvp focus I described, which will be a turnoff to people who want pure quake-style action). I've always hoped to see an MMO which applies the same kind of rules, but so far I haven't seen any.
That right there is why your anecdotes are irrelevant to a discussion about what regular users do. Regular people would just laugh at you (Or smile politely while trying not to laugh) if you tried to explain why you use Dvorak. The very idea of someone being *proud* of using a certain keyboard layout is laughable even to me, and I understand what you're talking about.
Aargh. No. Large sample size + random chance causes this. Human brains are lousy at understanding random, so they almost can't grasp that something that appears ordered might be a random fluke. Yes, every now and then you get someone's predictions who are spot on. But guess what, there are millions and millions of people who are constantly making predictions. Purely by random chance, one of those people is going to, on hindsight appear infallible.
Consider a program that generates sets of 365 random 4 or 5 digit numbers and names them. Generate enough such sets and one of them will perfectly predict the dow jones average for every day next year. That is what you're seeing.
There are no amazing people who are always right, there are only amazing people who have always been right so far. My brain is broken like this too and it makes me sad, but the fact is humans are pathetically stupid at apprehending randomness.
People keep saying this system will prevent cheating, but there are still several avenues of cheating possible. Doing so requires either A> hacking the box or B> inserting a device between the box and the internet (possibly as simple as a second ethernet card in your pc, or a local network on which your pc is sniffing and injecting packets).
Possible man-in-the-middle attacks include aimbots (recognize pattern, send inputs that place crosshair over pattern and fire), better-than-human macros (think auto-combos for fighting games), automation (botting in resource-gathering games), etc.
This certainly would eliminate some very common and troublesome cheats, but there's still a lot of stuff it wouldn't stop.
People who suggest cycling as a commute should just bite themselves. Typical car commute in the metro areas is 30 min without traffic slowdowns.
And with traffic slowdowns, biking is often barely slower and occasionally even faster than driving. While biking isn't a good choice for everyone, there are quite a lot of people who probably should bike to work.
"They should realize that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,"
I would lay pretty good odds that being shown up by a woman is among the reasons male geeks treat female geeks badly. Pointing out that some of these women are smarter and better is more likely to get insecure men to try harder to put women down so nobody will notice if they do have a superior talent.
It isn't about driving used cars, renting and having fewer toys, If you're already barely scraping by, and you decide to quit your job over an rfid implant, then you and your kids are going to starve if you don't find some form of income quickly. Not everybody has the privilege of just deciding to quit their job without fear of consequence. Or are you just suggesting that people should feel good about going on welfare because every employer in their area requires an RFID implant?
Nobody accidentally sets up a webserver. It takes effort to open a webserver. People accidentally leave their wifi open all the time.
Plenty of people want to set up a home network, and they're not interested in the details. They buy it, go home, plug it in, and try to make it go. If it works, great, they're done. If not, they futz with it until it works. Is it open? Secure? Who knows, who cares, they just want it to work for them. You can call them stupid if you want, but that's the reality of the situation.
Nowadays wireless routers are coming default-secure more, but it seems clear that 90% of the open-access wireless in your neighborhood has more to do with people being clueless than being generous. And that right there is why you have to assume that people don't want to share their broadband, even if it looks to you, as a tech-savvy person, like they do.
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As long as Blizzard is making money off the auction house I'm not playing D3. I gave them the benefit and bought it once, but there's no way I'm falling for freemium-in-disguise again. I'd much rather pay a monthly fee and have the game actually be balanced correctly. D3 was fun for a while, and had some good innovations, but it also had some glaring flaws and the auction house alone would've overwhelmed any good qualities it had. When there's a profit motive to making the game worse, you can count on a mediocre-at-best product.
Depends where you get your milk. There's a farm pretty close to me that sells milk and you can go see the cows wandering around in a field grazing. They may not be 100% as happy as some theoretical happiest cow, but I find it hard to picture anyone finding a serious problem with it who isn't espousing some extreme fringe ideal of animal freedom and independence.
All of that is to say that someone might be a vegetarian for animal welfare reasons and drink milk from such a place and that would be logically consistent.
My understanding is that greasemonkey adds scripts that modify the page, rather than modifying the incoming javascript, but I don't know much about how it works under the hood, perhaps I'm mistaken. Even so, there is nothing illegal about running greasemonkey or sharing greasemonkey scripts, is there? Which means that changing the license for the page's javascript doesn't add anything from a legal or practical standpoint.
What meaningful freedom? You can't easily take the source, modify it significantly and use it on the site no matter what license they give you. Yeah, you can hack your own library into the page, but who really cares at all about whatever insignificant javascript the government is using to validate their form. I can kind of see making some kind of fuss about obfuscated javascript (because then it's hard to know what your computer is about to do, if you're the paranoid type), but most javascript is only obfuscated by being poorly written. Either that, or it's condensed for very practical reasons of bandwidth conservation.
While it's technically true that content existed before DRM, it's not actually meaningful the way you phrased it.
DRM used to exist in the form of the natural laws of the universe. Copying a book by hand with a pen pretty effectively meant you weren't going to be distributing it very widely. Copying a TV before the advent of the VCR was effectively impossible for almost everyone. Moreover, the inherent physical impediments to copying data was a far more effective form of DRM than anything that exists now. Technology has broken medium-inherent DRM, and now content producers are trying to build it back up in software. That's not meant to be a judgment on whether DRM is good or bad, just pointing out that in the general sense of something that prevents information from getting around, DRM has always existed.
Who is going to certify the chemicals they use for these smells? I barely trust the FDA to certify food additives, I'm not sure Iike the idea of sitting in a movie theatre inhaling whatever chemicals this company found that smells like strawberries and gunpowder.
They also have less market value than a bag of tulip bulbs, at the moment. A bag of tulip bulbs don't come cheap (for most reasonable notions of "a bag of tulip bulbs")
ASL (American Sign Language) is a full-fledged (i.e. forgein) language. You can learn to speak it poorly by just transliterating your english into signs, but it doesn't even use the same word order in all cases. Just signing along with what you say in English doesn't make you fluent in ASL.
Erasing accidental flamebait mod
Well, if someone is reading a bunch of hate speech I might be made uncomfortable by that. A page with images of cross-burnings and hangings and the like could very well make me uncomfortable to be there. Yet that does not justify censorship. There's lots of things in the world that will be upsetting to someone. Pornography happens to be upsetting to a larger number of US citizens than most things, but, as always, unpopular (and politically dangerous) speech is the only kind that really needs protecting to begin with.
Coming up with the clever algorithm to solve a problem is what is fun
Some important distinctions to make are between coding, design, and production, all of which are parts of the experience. Maybe the point of graphical programming environments isn't only to cater to the pure programming experience you're talking about, but also to give people the opportunity to experience the fun of designing, and seeing their ideas come to life.
As a kid learning BASIC on TRS-80, I did not care in the least about coming up with a clever algorithm. Deciding what to make, creating it and seeing it work was the fun part. For some people, the clever algorithm may indeed be the only fun part of programming, but for me (even now, as an adult and a professional programmer) there is a lot of satisfaction to be had in the design and production parts of the job. Coming up with clever algorithms and solutions definitely is fun, but so are the other parts.
You're essentially arguing that the process itself is all that is, or should matter to people, but I think that misses an important part of any creative enterprise.
Also, as a kid, that sense of "wow, I just made this computer do something it didn't before!" was a pretty rewarding feeling. I think new programmers probably still get some of that.
I'm prepared to believe that the wireless companies do their own gouging of customers, but cramming is about third-parties charging your account. What this settlement aims to do is hold the carriers responsible for those third-party charges. And they should be held responsible, but this isn't quite the same thing as the carriers just charging you random amounts themselves.
I use QT and love it too, but it has some serious drawbacks, from my perspective. The biggest is that it requires a wonky special compilation system. You either have to use the build system they offer (qmake) or you have to manually run their generator yourself (moc - though if you were a masochist you could learn to write out the files moc makes yourself and avoid using it).
I compare every IDE to Eclipse, because that's the best IDE I've seen for any language. But I've never found that CDT, the C++ plugin for Eclipse, is any good. It fails to work out of the box for me and is a pain to configure (but I haven't tried it in a few years). QT Creator, while usable, is really an immature product. There's no support for refactoring, the UI is unintuitive and awkward (for me, at least) and there's lots of little issues with it. Plus you're committed to MingW, which can be a problem depending on what libraries you want to use. Codeblocks is a pretty good IDE, but it doesn't have a QT plugin, so you're left with the problem of dealing with moc files. Visual Studio has a plugin, but it only works with the paid versions.
All of this can be dealt with (and I do) but it's annoying.
So is mine!
Playing sports well does take a lot of mental acuity. Not the same variety that goes into writing good code, but mental acuity all the same. I think it's entirely likely that even if you weren't a physical wreck, you would find it impossible to compete mentally with a professional team-sport athlete in the context of that sporting event.
There's a quality often revered to as "vision" but doesn't actually refer to the athlete's ability to resolve fine detail optically. It refers to having a brain that very quickly sees opportunities, calculates trajectories, and anticipates the movements and intentions of 9-14 other players. If we stuck your brain in a robot body capable of matching their physical abilities, you would still be too stupid (in that domain) to be better than merely good.
Watching sports is another activity entirely, and while some of it certainly is cretinous, jingoism for people with only a couple neurons to rub together, it's entirely possible to be a nerd, an amateur athlete, and to enjoy watching a sport. There are a lot of interesting complexity, strategic decision-making and other highbrow elements even if you disregard the entertainment that is the spectacle of human physical excellence. Personally, I enjoy seeing a guy jump nearly his own height. I think it's neat. I wouldn't watch nothing but that for hours on end, but it seems a little silly to disregard displays of phenomenal ability out of hand.
A lot of people assume that the point of any MMO is to gain levels, items powers and build a character over time, to defeat big monsters, and that anything that detracts from that is bad. Alternatively, you could make a point of a game that isn't about attaching yourself emotionally to some glorified ProgressQuest, and whose interest is the conflict. There's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of the combination of varied builds, fast leveling, player lootings, permanent death, and meaningful in-game factions. Lots of people like quake, and lots of people like MMO style pvp. So what you do is you make a game that combines the interesting aspects of experimenting with a reasonably complex character skillset system, which is something people like about PVP in MMOs, with the action and general painlessness of dieing in Quake.
The other thing wrong with PVP in MMOs is that it is very rarely balanced well. It's often the case that there's either NO pvp or unlimited pvp. A system that allows pvp within a certain power range (as determined by levels, for example) is a way to make it so that PVP doesn't devolve into griefing. Most of the real griefing problems come from letting people of maximum power freely attack those of minimum power. By restricting it within a range that creates at least a reasonable baseline of parity while allowing freedom to fight otherwise, you avoid the stupid kind of pvp which is not fun, and you get a fun style of competition using the RPG style combat mechanics.
I play a mud called carrion fields which works on this model, but it's still a mud (and combines roleplay with the pvp focus I described, which will be a turnoff to people who want pure quake-style action). I've always hoped to see an MMO which applies the same kind of rules, but so far I haven't seen any.
As a proud Dvorak user
That right there is why your anecdotes are irrelevant to a discussion about what regular users do. Regular people would just laugh at you (Or smile politely while trying not to laugh) if you tried to explain why you use Dvorak. The very idea of someone being *proud* of using a certain keyboard layout is laughable even to me, and I understand what you're talking about.
Aargh. No. Large sample size + random chance causes this. Human brains are lousy at understanding random, so they almost can't grasp that something that appears ordered might be a random fluke. Yes, every now and then you get someone's predictions who are spot on. But guess what, there are millions and millions of people who are constantly making predictions. Purely by random chance, one of those people is going to, on hindsight appear infallible.
Consider a program that generates sets of 365 random 4 or 5 digit numbers and names them. Generate enough such sets and one of them will perfectly predict the dow jones average for every day next year. That is what you're seeing.
There are no amazing people who are always right, there are only amazing people who have always been right so far. My brain is broken like this too and it makes me sad, but the fact is humans are pathetically stupid at apprehending randomness.
People keep saying this system will prevent cheating, but there are still several avenues of cheating possible. Doing so requires either A> hacking the box or B> inserting a device between the box and the internet (possibly as simple as a second ethernet card in your pc, or a local network on which your pc is sniffing and injecting packets).
Possible man-in-the-middle attacks include aimbots (recognize pattern, send inputs that place crosshair over pattern and fire), better-than-human macros (think auto-combos for fighting games), automation (botting in resource-gathering games), etc.
This certainly would eliminate some very common and troublesome cheats, but there's still a lot of stuff it wouldn't stop.
People who suggest cycling as a commute should just bite themselves. Typical car commute in the metro areas is 30 min without traffic slowdowns.
And with traffic slowdowns, biking is often barely slower and occasionally even faster than driving. While biking isn't a good choice for everyone, there are quite a lot of people who probably should bike to work.
"They should realize that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,"
I would lay pretty good odds that being shown up by a woman is among the reasons male geeks treat female geeks badly. Pointing out that some of these women are smarter and better is more likely to get insecure men to try harder to put women down so nobody will notice if they do have a superior talent.
It isn't about driving used cars, renting and having fewer toys, If you're already barely scraping by, and you decide to quit your job over an rfid implant, then you and your kids are going to starve if you don't find some form of income quickly. Not everybody has the privilege of just deciding to quit their job without fear of consequence. Or are you just suggesting that people should feel good about going on welfare because every employer in their area requires an RFID implant?
Nobody accidentally sets up a webserver. It takes effort to open a webserver. People accidentally leave their wifi open all the time.
Plenty of people want to set up a home network, and they're not interested in the details. They buy it, go home, plug it in, and try to make it go. If it works, great, they're done. If not, they futz with it until it works. Is it open? Secure? Who knows, who cares, they just want it to work for them. You can call them stupid if you want, but that's the reality of the situation.
Nowadays wireless routers are coming default-secure more, but it seems clear that 90% of the open-access wireless in your neighborhood has more to do with people being clueless than being generous. And that right there is why you have to assume that people don't want to share their broadband, even if it looks to you, as a tech-savvy person, like they do.
Or do the math before shooting off in someone else's mouth.
Tact:
"Acute sensitivity to what is proper and appropriate in dealing with others, including the ability to speak or act without offending."
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=tact