I received a warning a few days ago for saying that I was bisexual in Durotar general chat.
It was like this:
[1. General][Ravenhurst] I'm bisexual.
And I got a warning for it.
Totally lame.
Also, note comment #127 on this page. The original comment is no longer in the thread for some reason, but a pertinent part is quoted. I'll blockquote the whole comment:
I was kicked out of a guild because I made the slip of typing "gotta go my hubbies home". I didn't mean to advertise, just made a (for me) everyday statement. Just as you might say that my wife or gf just got home. All we want is a group to play the game with that isn't going to judge us if we happen to make the wrong comment.
Blizzard can't keep people from judging you. And they cannot make people like you if they don't, regardless of the reasons.
Welcome to today's society. Every action has consequences. You know how a large part of society feels towards this issue. How you choose to deal with it can make the situation better or worse, depending on your point of view.
You can be in the closet, interact well with everyone, but be hiding a core part of you. Tradeoff.
You can be an activist, interact poorly with a large part of society (no fault of your own, just how it is), but not be hiding anything. Tradeoff.
You can choose some balance between these two. Tradeoff.
You cannot have both in today's society, and this is something no one can change overnight. Deal with it. Not trying to be mean, just pragmatic.
As you can see, Blizzard passes out warns for people mentioning their sexuality, and people get kicked out of guilds for letting it slip, even indirectly, that they're gay.
This has already been pointed out many times, but the guild isn't homosexual-only, it's homosexual-friendly. And believe it or not, gay-friendly isn't code for gay-only. It means exactly what it says: everyone is welcome as long as they don't have a problem with gay people and don't use offensive language.
The big problem, really, stems from the fact that basically all guilds are straight-friendly (not that that's a problem in itself). You don't have to advertise it in your guild spams because it's just sort of assumed, the same way one assumes a car comes with wheels. It's not something you even think about, it's so obvious. Gay people don't have that luxury; the have to worry about people kicking them out of their guild if it's discovered that they're gay. Mind you, not all guilds would do this, but you can bet a lot more would kick you out for being gay than being straight.
There was a guy in a WoW forum thread a while back who was talking about how he got kicked out of a guild for mentioning that he had a boyfriend. That's something gay people have to worry about; whereas the thought of someone kicking me out of my guild for mentioning that I have a wife is ludicrous. Maybe somewhere, somehow it could happen, but I doubt it ever has.
Gay people generally don't want to throw their sexuality into peoples' faces. They just don't want to have to worry about casual remarks that might tip people off about their sexuality.
I play warcraft with my wife. Our guildmates know that we're married, and thus they implicitly know that we're heterosexual. In fact, by so much as mentioning my wife, I'm revealing my sexuality. Of course, even if I were reported for that, I highly doubt I'd receive any sort of warning.
On the other hand, if god forbid a male player mentions that he has a boyfriend, he can get a warning for revealing that he's gay... not to mention getting flamed in forum discussions for "throwing his sexuality into people's faces."
I'm not clear on why someone being gay is an affront to other people's existance. Wingnuts, care to respond to this? Sin or not, why does it bother you so much if someone else is gay? Why does someone else's decision about their own sexuality have to be contraversial? Why choose to be offended when you could shrug it off as none of your business?
The article at several points mentions the "tools" that people need in order to roleplay in MMORPGs, yet never actually says what those tools are. So what are these tools, exactly? What features to hard-core RPers dream of having in MMORPGs?
Okay, here's one. "Free speech" can now be confined to zones that are conveniently off camera and away from the president.
Also, many people whose civil rights have been violated would be hard pressed to post a reply here because they're being held indefinitely without trial at Gitmo. They have a hard enough time getting access to a lawyer, let alone Slashdot.
Free most of the time is not free enough. As the neocons like to point out, we're not nearly as bad as a lot of places. That seems to be a common neocon argument: "Look! They're totally worse than us! Look! They did it too!"
It's not okay just because someone else is worse. This is the sort of thing that needs to be nipped in the bud. Allowing it to run rampant for twenty years will only make it harder to fix.
Another example being if the sealing were to catastrophically fail, you'd have 8 gallons of cooking oil that wanted out, and if you weren't at home could very well destroy the board.
If only it were true. He seems to be able to lie us into a war, shred the constitution, hand out important government jobs like stocking stuffers to incompetent nitwits, give aid and comfort to our enemies in time of war, suppress political descent...
I dunno, it seems like we've been in a constant state of "political descent" ever since he took office. Now, political dissent, on the other hand, he suppresses with impunity.
Sure it is, if you want to explore something and actually come back to the same people you left. Accelerating at 1g in normal space is enough to get you a long way away in your own lifetime, but if you ever turned around and came back, you'd show up tens, hundreds, or thousands of years later (maybe more), depending on how long you were accelerating.
The pestilence trope then brings into forefront notions of eradication and extermination. Depending on the game and the game mechanics, this is typically a combination of systematic harassment and slaughter:
The only good kind of farmer is a dead one. [WoW, M, 38]
Yes. I enjoy killing gold farmers repeatedly. I play on PvP servers. [WoW, M, 26]
In Lineage 2 there were constantly Korea farmers and we hated them and killed them constantly. I can honestly say the way Korean players acted in that game was enough for myself and my guild to stereotype Korean teenagers, then hunt them down and kill them all. [WoW, M, 40]
In 2004, a fan video titled "Farm the Farmers Day" showed actual footage as players tracked down and massacred players they suspected to be adena farmers (see Constance's paper for more on this).
"Systematic harassment and slaughter?" Get real. It's a game. Let's be honest: gold farmers are an annoyance. If you PK them, you're annoying them back, and you're doing it within the rule structure of whatever game you're playing. These people signed up for accounts on PVP servers, so they're going to have to deal with being PKed just like the rest of us. If they stopped being annoying, they wouldn't be PKed as much.
Also note that only one of the three comments is racist. The other two are just people having fun at the expense of other people who are being an annoyance and violating game rules.
Interestingly...
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
These all apply to Qt as well. To each their own.:)
It's both modern and actively developed and maintained, with a vibrant surrounding community.
It offers a wide array of options for extending your work to as many people as possible, including a sophisticated framework for internationalization, localization, and accessibility.
It's simple and easy to use, both for developers and users.
It's well designed, flexible, and extensible.
It's free software with a liberal open source license.
It's portable, both from the user's and the developer's perspective.
Seriously, have you ever tried to get anything done in half an hour?
That said, your kids already know how to boot up knoppix, temporarily shut off your cron script, reboot, play games, turn the script back on, and shut down the computer before you get home. And if they don't know it yet, they'l figure it out. Nothing motivates kids like excessive and arbitrary restrictions.
When I was a kid, my parents did similar things. It only served to make me angry. The time I spent using the computer was a lot more useful than, say, the time I spent running around outside or reading school books for no reason. I figured out pretty quickly how to defeat their various computer-time-limiting methods.
Good luck.
P.S. I have to know... is this Ask Slashdot a troll? Did the editors approve it because they knew people would get riled up?
P.P.S. Yes, this answer is offtopic. Saying this is worth burning some mod points.
Free and/or open source software such as Linux, the GNU tools, Mozilla, Open Office, GNOME, KDE, MySQL, Apache, Postgres, and many other wildly successful tools have been worked on for countless hours by skilled programmers and designers. Whether out of the kindness of their own hearts, desire for recognition, or a business investment, people have spent millions of hours designing, developing, testing, and documenting Free Software. Consider for a moment how much it woud have cost to pay each and every one of those people for their time. That's the amount of money that hass been put into Free Software.
If someone gives you a mansion, you don't assume it's worthless because you didn't pay for it. The worth is still there; someone else already paid for it.
This was an email sent out promoting his class to a number of students who may be interested in it. As such, he was acting in a professional capacity, and standards of professional conduct should apply. Furthermore, when you send inflammatory email to large groups of people, even those who generally agree with you, you should assume that it will eventually be made public.
A recent e-mail from Mirecki to members of a student organization referred to religious conservatives as "fundies" and said a course describing intelligent design as mythology would be a "nice slap in their big fat face." Mirecki apologized for those comments.
It's too bad he had to be so unprofessional. I'm all in favor of his class, but I can't sympathize with someone who acts like that. He's basically ruined it for other universities that may want to do something similar because he made it into a personal issue instead of an academic one.
Interestingly enough, it appears as if Cheapass Games sells a few computer games of their own. I wouldn't be surprised if a few hobby and game stores sold their computer games alongside their board and card games.
I haven't seen it pointed out yet that requiring all games sold in retail stores to be rated forces indie game developers (who may not have the money in the first place) into a (presumably costly) rating process that would effectively bar them from getting their games on to store shelves.
Mind you, I'm not aware of any indie games sold at retail outlets, but there may be an unfilled Cheapass Games like niche that would be closed by this law.
Dear Author of the latest MS-Funded Windows vs. Linux Study,
Several years ago, when I bought my first house, my mother pitched in a substantial sum of money to help me with the down payment. I have since paid her back; however, she still holds this favor over my head every chance she gets. How can I ask her to stop it without seeming like an ingrate?
Sincerely, Exasperated in Topeka
*
Dear Exasperated,
Results of the latest MS-Funded Windows vs. Linux Study confirm what IT managers have known all along: The total cost of ownership of Windows XP Professional in a typical customer environment is less than half that of Linux (1). Furthermore, 76% of security professionals (2) agree that Windows XP Professional is more secure (3) than Linux when running in a server environment. Finally, for common customer workloads (4), a single iPAQ PDA running Windows CE is just as useful as an IBM Linux mainframe, and far easier to carry!
Footnotes: (1) Fedora Core 6.0 Pre-Alpha (2) We actually sampled the security guard at the local Wal-Mart 100 times. 76 of his responses seemed vaguely affirmative, 12 of them were negative, 6 were completely unintelligible, 5 were complete silence, and once he gave us a weird look and farted. (3) When powered off (4) Personal scheduling, Minesweeper
Signed, Author of the latest MS-Funded Windows vs. Linux Study
Anyone have time to, say, download this driver and fire up UT2004 or somesuch and test the framerate using software rendering vs their 3d card (with all other settings being equal)? Of course, this wouldn't be particularly scientific, but it would at least give some idea about how well this thing performs and whether it's useful.
Slashdot Mirror
First comment on the page, #281. I'll blockquote it here in case (like other messages in that thread) it happens to mysteriously dissappear:
Also, note comment #127 on this page. The original comment is no longer in the thread for some reason, but a pertinent part is quoted. I'll blockquote the whole comment:
As you can see, Blizzard passes out warns for people mentioning their sexuality, and people get kicked out of guilds for letting it slip, even indirectly, that they're gay.
Very clever.
Animals can't give consent. Other humans can. Rather than coming back with a bad analogy, how about an honest answer to the question?
This has already been pointed out many times, but the guild isn't homosexual-only, it's homosexual-friendly. And believe it or not, gay-friendly isn't code for gay-only. It means exactly what it says: everyone is welcome as long as they don't have a problem with gay people and don't use offensive language.
The big problem, really, stems from the fact that basically all guilds are straight-friendly (not that that's a problem in itself). You don't have to advertise it in your guild spams because it's just sort of assumed, the same way one assumes a car comes with wheels. It's not something you even think about, it's so obvious. Gay people don't have that luxury; the have to worry about people kicking them out of their guild if it's discovered that they're gay. Mind you, not all guilds would do this, but you can bet a lot more would kick you out for being gay than being straight.
There was a guy in a WoW forum thread a while back who was talking about how he got kicked out of a guild for mentioning that he had a boyfriend. That's something gay people have to worry about; whereas the thought of someone kicking me out of my guild for mentioning that I have a wife is ludicrous. Maybe somewhere, somehow it could happen, but I doubt it ever has.
Gay people generally don't want to throw their sexuality into peoples' faces. They just don't want to have to worry about casual remarks that might tip people off about their sexuality.
I play warcraft with my wife. Our guildmates know that we're married, and thus they implicitly know that we're heterosexual. In fact, by so much as mentioning my wife, I'm revealing my sexuality. Of course, even if I were reported for that, I highly doubt I'd receive any sort of warning.
On the other hand, if god forbid a male player mentions that he has a boyfriend, he can get a warning for revealing that he's gay... not to mention getting flamed in forum discussions for "throwing his sexuality into people's faces."
I'm not clear on why someone being gay is an affront to other people's existance. Wingnuts, care to respond to this? Sin or not, why does it bother you so much if someone else is gay? Why does someone else's decision about their own sexuality have to be contraversial? Why choose to be offended when you could shrug it off as none of your business?
The article at several points mentions the "tools" that people need in order to roleplay in MMORPGs, yet never actually says what those tools are. So what are these tools, exactly? What features to hard-core RPers dream of having in MMORPGs?
Okay, here's one. "Free speech" can now be confined to zones that are conveniently off camera and away from the president.
Also, many people whose civil rights have been violated would be hard pressed to post a reply here because they're being held indefinitely without trial at Gitmo. They have a hard enough time getting access to a lawyer, let alone Slashdot.
Free most of the time is not free enough. As the neocons like to point out, we're not nearly as bad as a lot of places. That seems to be a common neocon argument: "Look! They're totally worse than us! Look! They did it too!"
It's not okay just because someone else is worse. This is the sort of thing that needs to be nipped in the bud. Allowing it to run rampant for twenty years will only make it harder to fix.
...America will blow up the moon!
(obligatory Mr. Show reference)
Another example being if the sealing were to catastrophically fail, you'd have 8 gallons of cooking oil that wanted out, and if you weren't at home could very well destroy the board.
...and your floor.
If only it were true. He seems to be able to lie us into a war, shred the constitution, hand out important government jobs like stocking stuffers to incompetent nitwits, give aid and comfort to our enemies in time of war, suppress political descent ...
I dunno, it seems like we've been in a constant state of "political descent" ever since he took office. Now, political dissent, on the other hand, he suppresses with impunity.
Sure it is, if you want to explore something and actually come back to the same people you left. Accelerating at 1g in normal space is enough to get you a long way away in your own lifetime, but if you ever turned around and came back, you'd show up tens, hundreds, or thousands of years later (maybe more), depending on how long you were accelerating.
"Systematic harassment and slaughter?" Get real. It's a game. Let's be honest: gold farmers are an annoyance. If you PK them, you're annoying them back, and you're doing it within the rule structure of whatever game you're playing. These people signed up for accounts on PVP servers, so they're going to have to deal with being PKed just like the rest of us. If they stopped being annoying, they wouldn't be PKed as much.
Also note that only one of the three comments is racist. The other two are just people having fun at the expense of other people who are being an annoyance and violating game rules.
Sure it was... I completely failed to answer the question.
HAAAAAAN SOOOOOLLLLOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
"Dammit, Han, are you high?"
"You nerfherder!"
"At least I have a power converter."
Seriously, have you ever tried to get anything done in half an hour?
That said, your kids already know how to boot up knoppix, temporarily shut off your cron script, reboot, play games, turn the script back on, and shut down the computer before you get home. And if they don't know it yet, they'l figure it out. Nothing motivates kids like excessive and arbitrary restrictions.
When I was a kid, my parents did similar things. It only served to make me angry. The time I spent using the computer was a lot more useful than, say, the time I spent running around outside or reading school books for no reason. I figured out pretty quickly how to defeat their various computer-time-limiting methods.
Good luck.
P.S. I have to know... is this Ask Slashdot a troll? Did the editors approve it because they knew people would get riled up?
P.P.S. Yes, this answer is offtopic. Saying this is worth burning some mod points.
HAAARRRRRRYYYY JEEEEEEENKINS!!!
(Wow, making this joke is complicated. This line has to be here to pass the lameness filter. Please ignore it.)
Time is money.
Free and/or open source software such as Linux, the GNU tools, Mozilla, Open Office, GNOME, KDE, MySQL, Apache, Postgres, and many other wildly successful tools have been worked on for countless hours by skilled programmers and designers. Whether out of the kindness of their own hearts, desire for recognition, or a business investment, people have spent millions of hours designing, developing, testing, and documenting Free Software. Consider for a moment how much it woud have cost to pay each and every one of those people for their time. That's the amount of money that hass been put into Free Software.
If someone gives you a mansion, you don't assume it's worthless because you didn't pay for it. The worth is still there; someone else already paid for it.
This was an email sent out promoting his class to a number of students who may be interested in it. As such, he was acting in a professional capacity, and standards of professional conduct should apply. Furthermore, when you send inflammatory email to large groups of people, even those who generally agree with you, you should assume that it will eventually be made public.
A recent e-mail from Mirecki to members of a student organization referred to religious conservatives as "fundies" and said a course describing intelligent design as mythology would be a "nice slap in their big fat face." Mirecki apologized for those comments.
It's too bad he had to be so unprofessional. I'm all in favor of his class, but I can't sympathize with someone who acts like that. He's basically ruined it for other universities that may want to do something similar because he made it into a personal issue instead of an academic one.
Interestingly enough, it appears as if Cheapass Games sells a few computer games of their own. I wouldn't be surprised if a few hobby and game stores sold their computer games alongside their board and card games.
I haven't seen it pointed out yet that requiring all games sold in retail stores to be rated forces indie game developers (who may not have the money in the first place) into a (presumably costly) rating process that would effectively bar them from getting their games on to store shelves.
Mind you, I'm not aware of any indie games sold at retail outlets, but there may be an unfilled Cheapass Games like niche that would be closed by this law.
Dear Author of the latest MS-Funded Windows vs. Linux Study,
Several years ago, when I bought my first house, my mother pitched in a substantial sum of money to help me with the down payment. I have since paid her back; however, she still holds this favor over my head every chance she gets. How can I ask her to stop it without seeming like an ingrate?
Sincerely,
Exasperated in Topeka
*
Dear Exasperated,
Results of the latest MS-Funded Windows vs. Linux Study confirm what IT managers have known all along: The total cost of ownership of Windows XP Professional in a typical customer environment is less than half that of Linux (1). Furthermore, 76% of security professionals (2) agree that Windows XP Professional is more secure (3) than Linux when running in a server environment. Finally, for common customer workloads (4), a single iPAQ PDA running Windows CE is just as useful as an IBM Linux mainframe, and far easier to carry!
Footnotes:
(1) Fedora Core 6.0 Pre-Alpha
(2) We actually sampled the security guard at the local Wal-Mart 100 times. 76 of his responses seemed vaguely affirmative, 12 of them were negative, 6 were completely unintelligible, 5 were complete silence, and once he gave us a weird look and farted.
(3) When powered off
(4) Personal scheduling, Minesweeper
Signed,
Author of the latest MS-Funded Windows vs. Linux Study
Last week, the latest build of Windows Vista became so horrendously bloated that it underwent gravitational collapse... coincidence?
Call me when they alter the gravitational constant.
Anyone have time to, say, download this driver and fire up UT2004 or somesuch and test the framerate using software rendering vs their 3d card (with all other settings being equal)? Of course, this wouldn't be particularly scientific, but it would at least give some idea about how well this thing performs and whether it's useful.