From what I understand, the majority of those BBB complaints are from disgruntled players who had their Diablo II, Warcraft III, and StarCraft II keys blocked from online play due to user violations.
The report suggests that you're half right. From the BBB report:
Recent complainants allege the company closed accounts on 130,000 users without providing notice, and accused them of using "hack" techniques to cheat on gaming. Most of these complainants deny any illegal usage, and in some cases, they challange[sic] the company to provide them some proof of the alleged violation.
So, it appears that many of the complaints are from players blocked due to accusations of cheating, but the accusations are disputed. The complainants apparently received no evidence they were cheating:
The company addressed a few complaints regarding account terminations by issuing the same letter in each instance of complaint, accusing the complainant of cheating, lying or using hack programs.
Of course, just because it's in a BBB report doesn't make it true. But I wouldn't assume that the banned players were all justifiably banned and even if so, surely the player should be given some evidence justifying the termination of his account, don't you think?
(To be fair to Vivendi: they might be concerned that if they showed their evidence, newer hacks wouldn't produce the evidence.)
...but would I be willing to give up my house, land, and paved roads to my job? I don't think so.
Yeah, good point. Since you use wood and wood products, we should have utterly no concern that scientists are being pressured to change their reported findings.
Wow. I feel better already.
The article isn't about environmentalism. It is about political pressure for scientists to report what the administration wants to hear. I'm not saying the report is accurate or not or that the issue is important or not, but if we want to argue those claims, then the construction and location of your house is fairly irrelevant.
You think the probability of drug use given that the driver is speeding is better than one in three?
Note: we're not talking about the probability that someone uses or has used drugs some time, given that he's speeding, but that he is carrying illegal drugs or is stoned at the instant he was caught speeding. That UF report isn't so relevant for this.
I would guess that your probabilities are way off. Last time I was on a U.S. highway, there was a decent number of speeders. Let's say 1 in 4 cars were speeding. You think that 1/3 of those (so roughly 8% of all the folks on the road) were either stoned or carrying drugs?
There is also frequently a connection to drug use, thus the fact that the vehicle was speeding is automatically sufficient cause to search a vehicle for drugs, even if only to add the potential for DWI charges.
"Automatically sufficient cause"?
What do you think is the probability that a driver has illegal drugs in the car, given that he was speeding?
Doesn't sound like any form of reasonable suspicion to me.
One individual (via a Foundation, granted) donated considerably more to charity than the entire US government committed in aid for the recent tsunami disaster.
Is this true? Last I heard, the U.S. government pledged $350 million in relief aid (though at first they spoke of $35 million).
In other words: some people find careless speech repulsive. Thus, we should do whatever we can to promote correct usage as opposed to legalising incorrect uses.
But linguists don't legislate use. They're only interested in existing usage. Look to other sources for normative judgments.
And believe me: I hate what I consider linguistic abuses as much as you do. I wrote a little Gnus function to black out those goddamn smilies so I don't see them in Usenet posts.
But neither my personal tastes nor more authoritative pronouncements about what is good language have much to do with what linguists study.
If I had any credibility, I would be burning it here, but I like Enterprise.
I haven't seen all of season three yet (Thanks, BitTorrent!), but from what I've seen of Enterprise, it is a clever, humorous and well-written Trek. The characters are considerably subtler than, say, TNG's attempts at characters-via-quirks:
Picard = Earl Gray
Data = Sherlock Holmes and attempts at humor and
Troi = annoyingly vague platitudes.
I'm a long time but casual Trek fan and I think that Enterprise has a bad rap. Doesn't fit into Canon? Okay. I can live with that. Honest. I still sleep at night.
My wife is a Trek newbie, but she wouldn't be watching if her introductory show was Deep Space Nine or Voyager, much less TOS.
Now, I must go hose myself, since I realize that I've just more or less given arguments for Windows XP or something.
That was the intention behind the original copyright laws: death of copyright-holder + 20 years.
Try again. The original copyright terms in the United States were fourteen years, renewable once for an additional fourteen (but they had to be actively renewed).
My problem was carpal tunnel syndrome brought on by overuse of the toilet brush. I thought I had a chance at getting to the 15th interview.
You were hotdogging. You knew the risks.
Hell, we both know that we got into this gig for the adventure, the rush of danger. Don't expect me to cry for you now. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the urinal.
Working at google is an easy gig to get. Just get on with the cleaning crew that does their office or something.
More ass-talking from the Slashdot crowd.
My Google custodial job took 12 interviews, 6 aptitude tests, 5 references and a letter of commendation from the local Sanitation Department. Even then, I probably wouldn't have the job if not for my exceptional refuse-handling and my skills with a toilet brush.
The existence of the X-No-Archive header suggests that implicit permission is given to archive.
Since when?
First, the Google archive includes posts that pre-date that header.
Second, there is nothing I know of in copyright law that allows me to use your work as long as I include an opt-out provision.
I'm not anti-Google. I like the old Google groups. But I've never understood how it's compatible with copyright law. It seems pretty clear that when one posts to usenet, he gives implicit permission to copy and circulate the post in the usual way. It's much less obvious that he's given permission for the post to be available via a permanent for-profit archive like Google.
I wish that some lawyer somewhere would enlighten me.
To my mind "irrational hatred" is something like what, say, a Denver Broncos fan might have for the Oakland Raiders (or pick any other pro sports intense rivalry).
Well, I guess I agreed with your reply up until this point.
Even here, you're mostly right until the parenthetical remark. I mean Broncos, Raiders, who cares?
But the Philadelphia Flyers are simply evil. Ain't no questions.
(A Pittsburgh fan, despite their last two seasons)
Really? Technically inclined individuals tend to look at things with a logical, rational approach. Most non-technically inclined individuals tend not to understand the technically inclined.
Therefore, it's more likely that technically inclined individuals have a rational hatred of Microsoft, but most people are lacking sufficient clue to understand why.
You're gratuitously flattering your readers and yourself. The idea that the "technically inclined" are dispassionate and logical when it comes to technical issues is a touch doubtful.
(Note: I'm not agreeing with the original poster that the dislike of MS is irrational.)
"The system offers unprecedented voice quality, touch-screen technology, dynamic reconfiguration capabilities to meet changing needs, and an operational availability of 0.9999999."
Whoah! 7 nines uptime!
22 seconds of downtime per year.
Nah, just a little typo. Someone forgot the trailin "%" sign.
Upon further reflection, your charge is fair, and the temptation for a cheap pun late at night was better resisted. OTOH, time will judge whether CERT loses objectivity.
Uh... This has never happened to me. What do we do now?
Are you sure you didn't want to fight or something?
According Allchin's unbiased memo, here's what's new.
* The highest quality OS we have ever shipped
* New information management tools to improve productivity, including fast desktop search and new, intuitive ways to organize files
* Major security advances that build on Windows XP SP2, such as new technologies to make clients more resilient to attack, viruses and malware
* Flexible and powerful tools to reduce deployment costs for enterprise customers, including technologies for image creation, editing and installation; and much simpler upgrades for consumers
* Significant improvements in reliability, including a robust diagnostic infrastructure to detect, analyze and fix problems quickly, and new backup tools to keep data safe
* A platform that creates Developer excitement with the availability of rich APIs [application programming interfaces]
Feel the developer excitement yet? Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
Wow. Sorry. I didn't realize that Allchin's memo was so hypnotic. I started channeling some fat, sweaty monkey man there for a moment.
Ten and a half hours? What an idiot. Why, I would have made her buy two new computers, a firewall, a new operating system and a shotgun, installed XP and FreeBSD before lunch and still charged her my usual billable rate, which is $70 gajillion.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understand, the majority of those BBB complaints are from disgruntled players who had their Diablo II, Warcraft III, and StarCraft II keys blocked from online play due to user violations.
The report suggests that you're half right. From the BBB report:
Recent complainants allege the company closed accounts on 130,000 users without providing notice, and accused them of using "hack" techniques to cheat on gaming. Most of these complainants deny any illegal usage, and in some cases, they challange[sic] the company to provide them some proof of the alleged violation.
So, it appears that many of the complaints are from players blocked due to accusations of cheating, but the accusations are disputed. The complainants apparently received no evidence they were cheating:
The company addressed a few complaints regarding account terminations by issuing the same letter in each instance of complaint, accusing the complainant of cheating, lying or using hack programs.
Of course, just because it's in a BBB report doesn't make it true. But I wouldn't assume that the banned players were all justifiably banned and even if so, surely the player should be given some evidence justifying the termination of his account, don't you think?
(To be fair to Vivendi: they might be concerned that if they showed their evidence, newer hacks wouldn't produce the evidence.)
...but would I be willing to give up my house, land, and paved roads to my job? I don't think so.
Yeah, good point. Since you use wood and wood products, we should have utterly no concern that scientists are being pressured to change their reported findings.
Wow. I feel better already.
The article isn't about environmentalism. It is about political pressure for scientists to report what the administration wants to hear. I'm not saying the report is accurate or not or that the issue is important or not, but if we want to argue those claims, then the construction and location of your house is fairly irrelevant.
You think the probability of drug use given that the driver is speeding is better than one in three?
Note: we're not talking about the probability that someone uses or has used drugs some time, given that he's speeding, but that he is carrying illegal drugs or is stoned at the instant he was caught speeding. That UF report isn't so relevant for this.
I would guess that your probabilities are way off. Last time I was on a U.S. highway, there was a decent number of speeders. Let's say 1 in 4 cars were speeding. You think that 1/3 of those (so roughly 8% of all the folks on the road) were either stoned or carrying drugs?
Seems a bit high, no? (No pun intended.)
There is also frequently a connection to drug use, thus the fact that the vehicle was speeding is automatically sufficient cause to search a vehicle for drugs, even if only to add the potential for DWI charges.
"Automatically sufficient cause"?
What do you think is the probability that a driver has illegal drugs in the car, given that he was speeding?
Doesn't sound like any form of reasonable suspicion to me.
One individual (via a Foundation, granted) donated considerably more to charity than the entire US government committed in aid for the recent tsunami disaster.
Is this true? Last I heard, the U.S. government pledged $350 million in relief aid (though at first they spoke of $35 million).
Did any individual pledge more than $350 million?
In other words: some people find careless speech repulsive. Thus, we should do whatever we can to promote correct usage as opposed to legalising incorrect uses.
But linguists don't legislate use. They're only interested in existing usage. Look to other sources for normative judgments.
And believe me: I hate what I consider linguistic abuses as much as you do. I wrote a little Gnus function to black out those goddamn smilies so I don't see them in Usenet posts.
But neither my personal tastes nor more authoritative pronouncements about what is good language have much to do with what linguists study.
I haven't seen all of season three yet (Thanks, BitTorrent!), but from what I've seen of Enterprise, it is a clever, humorous and well-written Trek. The characters are considerably subtler than, say, TNG's attempts at characters-via-quirks:
I'm a long time but casual Trek fan and I think that Enterprise has a bad rap. Doesn't fit into Canon? Okay. I can live with that. Honest. I still sleep at night.
My wife is a Trek newbie, but she wouldn't be watching if her introductory show was Deep Space Nine or Voyager, much less TOS.
Now, I must go hose myself, since I realize that I've just more or less given arguments for Windows XP or something.
That was the intention behind the original copyright laws: death of copyright-holder + 20 years.
Try again. The original copyright terms in the United States were fourteen years, renewable once for an additional fourteen (but they had to be actively renewed).
They were not "death + x years".
See Creative Commons .
Requiring 5.1 digital sound with multichannel reverb so Longhorn can tell the user "You've got mail!" ?
Isn't it a shame when your debate opponent embraces your reductio ad absurdum?
"Surround sound is going to be increasingly important in future offices."
From an MS group marketing manager, quoted in this article.
My problem was carpal tunnel syndrome brought on by overuse of the toilet brush. I thought I had a chance at getting to the 15th interview.
You were hotdogging. You knew the risks.
Hell, we both know that we got into this gig for the adventure, the rush of danger. Don't expect me to cry for you now. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the urinal.
Working at google is an easy gig to get. Just get on with the cleaning crew that does their office or something.
More ass-talking from the Slashdot crowd.
My Google custodial job took 12 interviews, 6 aptitude tests, 5 references and a letter of commendation from the local Sanitation Department. Even then, I probably wouldn't have the job if not for my exceptional refuse-handling and my skills with a toilet brush.
Insightful?
I think some of them whippersnappers are Slashdot moderators.
How many times have we seen these promises, until the technology hits the public domain...
DRM technology in the public domain? My head hurts.
SCARE people into realizing that their entire way of life is AT RISK if they continue to use IE.
Ain't no such thing as too much hyperbole. But I think you need to mention the war on terror. Or drugs. Whichever.
The existence of the X-No-Archive header suggests that implicit permission is given to archive.
Since when?
First, the Google archive includes posts that pre-date that header.
Second, there is nothing I know of in copyright law that allows me to use your work as long as I include an opt-out provision.
I'm not anti-Google. I like the old Google groups. But I've never understood how it's compatible with copyright law. It seems pretty clear that when one posts to usenet, he gives implicit permission to copy and circulate the post in the usual way. It's much less obvious that he's given permission for the post to be available via a permanent for-profit archive like Google.
I wish that some lawyer somewhere would enlighten me.
To my mind "irrational hatred" is something like what, say, a Denver Broncos fan might have for the Oakland Raiders (or pick any other pro sports intense rivalry).
Well, I guess I agreed with your reply up until this point.
Even here, you're mostly right until the parenthetical remark. I mean Broncos, Raiders, who cares?
But the Philadelphia Flyers are simply evil. Ain't no questions.
(A Pittsburgh fan, despite their last two seasons)
Really? Technically inclined individuals tend to look at things with a logical, rational approach. Most non-technically inclined individuals tend not to understand the technically inclined.
Therefore, it's more likely that technically inclined individuals have a rational hatred of Microsoft, but most people are lacking sufficient clue to understand why.
You're gratuitously flattering your readers and yourself. The idea that the "technically inclined" are dispassionate and logical when it comes to technical issues is a touch doubtful.
(Note: I'm not agreeing with the original poster that the dislike of MS is irrational.)
"The system offers unprecedented voice quality, touch-screen technology, dynamic reconfiguration capabilities to meet changing needs, and an operational availability of 0.9999999."
Whoah! 7 nines uptime!
22 seconds of downtime per year.
Nah, just a little typo. Someone forgot the trailin "%" sign.
Upon further reflection, your charge is fair, and the temptation for a cheap pun late at night was better resisted.
OTOH, time will judge whether CERT loses objectivity.
Uh... This has never happened to me. What do we do now?
Are you sure you didn't want to fight or something?
The Command Line Interface Terminal? Intuitive?
You're fooling yourself. Or your partners are fooling you.
Now, if 20,000 large doesn't freshen your breath to CERT, dunno what will.
This is insulting. I doubt seriously that researchers at CERT give a damn about Gates's contribution to CMU.
Now there are three buildings named after the same guy, Michael G. DeGroot.
What, Michael Hall, the DeGroot Research Institute and the hot new recreational area, the G Spot?
I suppose three is alright, but if they try to name another, they might run into issues. (Cue "Your name's not Bruce?" jokes.)
Sounds like the same broad points they use to describe every version of Windows. "Now Windows is faster and more reliable than ever!"
Some sequences approach infinity more rapidly than others...
According Allchin's unbiased memo, here's what's new.
* The highest quality OS we have ever shipped
* New information management tools to improve productivity, including fast desktop search and new, intuitive ways to organize files
* Major security advances that build on Windows XP SP2, such as new technologies to make clients more resilient to attack, viruses and malware
* Flexible and powerful tools to reduce deployment costs for enterprise customers, including technologies for image creation, editing and installation; and much simpler upgrades for consumers
* Significant improvements in reliability, including a robust diagnostic infrastructure to detect, analyze and fix problems quickly, and new backup tools to keep data safe
* A platform that creates Developer excitement with the availability of rich APIs [application programming interfaces]
Feel the developer excitement yet? Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
Wow. Sorry. I didn't realize that Allchin's memo was so hypnotic. I started channeling some fat, sweaty monkey man there for a moment.
Ten and a half hours? What an idiot. Why, I would have made her buy two new computers, a firewall, a new operating system and a shotgun, installed XP and FreeBSD before lunch and still charged her my usual billable rate, which is $70 gajillion.