The account name posted is not what you use to login. If you created an account after the Battle.net 2.0 account merger, you have no way of even knowing what your own "account name" is.
This is pretty interesting, but I think the OP is trying to spread FUD about what the implications of this data are. There is no personally identifying information contained in this watermark. It contains the server IP, server time, and account name. That's it. Now there's a lot of confusion about what "account name" means, so let me explain it for those who don't know.
About the same time that this watermark apparently showed up (2008, the 3.0 patch associated with the WotLK expansion), Blizzard converted the WoW login system so that it was integrated with their new Battle.net 2.0 login system. At this time, it became necessary to login to WoW using your account's email address instead of your traditional account name. That traditional account name is what's being encoded into the watermark, not your email address login. If you created an account after the Battle.net 2.0 merger, then your "account name" is a unique string that isn't even display to its owner. Anywhere in the account management webpage or login screen that this string would appear, it instead displays "WoW1", "WoW2", etc. (if you have more than one account). So there's basically no way to associate this "account name" with your login information, real identity, etc. If you play on a private server, that account name is going to be based on the private server's login system, not Blizzard's login system.
It's pretty obvious what the real purpose of these watermarks were: to identify users who violated the NDA of their closed betas and ban them from the beta, identify users attempting to sell their account, and possibly to identify the IP address of private servers to assist in attempting to shut them down.
Further, the probability that these info could be used to help harvest accounts for gold selling or to phish for accounts seems ridiculous. It'd be highly inefficient to spend so much time on a single user when for far less effort you could just spam a million harvested email addresses.
Skyrim PC, while still exhibiting a lot of Bethesda's traditional AI goofiness, is the most stable Bethesda game I've ever played, even before it had any patches. I completely understand your trepidation after Oblivion/FO3/NV, but as long as you don't get the PS3 version, Skyrim is actually pretty damn solid. Part of that is likely due to them moving to their own game engine rather than continuing to rely on Gamebryo.
At one point during the Steam summer sale, Skyrim was ~$30. I'd expect a similar (or better) price drop on Steam either during Black Friday or just after Christmas.
Actually, this is impossible. By the time we attempt to bring back an extinct species, another species is likely to have moved in and filled its niche. This other species was the genetic "winner" and we'd be bringing back the genetic "loser." The entire ecology of their habitat will likely have been shaken up and rebalanced (or on the road to rebalancing).
You can't just go: "Well, when we started recording data we estimated the population to be 300, so let's clone 300 of them and drop them out of a helicopter." Especially not if it's a higher order mammal or bird, because those species are likely to also have had a set of learned behaviors that the clones would no longer posses and we might have no way of knowing. Further, it's unlikely we'll have a large enough genetic sample to actually reintroduce a *population*. At best we'd be introducing a set of slightly genetically varied clones, who, depending on their mutation rate, would be inbred and be killed off again by the next minor upper respiratory disease.
And finally, the idea of genetically modifying them to be "less threatening to humans" just proves the writer of the article is an idiot and has no idea what she's talking about. If you modify a species to not be threatening to humans, you've modified it to also not be threatening to its prey or its predators. You haven't brought the species back, you've just created a new artificial species that's less viable and less able to defend itself. You've set it up to fail from the start.
There was nothing anti-science about Jurassic Park. Taking a scientific discovery and making a fucking theme park out of it for profit without any idea of the repercussions was the problem in the book, not the genetic engineering on its own.
Most high end raiding guilds only "grind" long enough to finish their sets or get their mounts or whatever, and then take a break until the next expansion. Only the bad players who can't finish the dungeons "grind" the parts they can complete until Blizzard nerfs the content enough for them to finish it.
As a kid I had a subscription to Ninteno Power from like 1990 until 1998. Sad to see it go but I honestly hadn't looked at an issue since then. The internet (and me not being a kid, as it was clearly marketed at the 10-16 year old demographic) made it totally irrelevant. I'm honestly surprised it managed to stick around this long.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. I haven't read it in over 20 years (possibly 25). The reason I know that at the end of the book they taste good is because that's the entire point of the book. The protagonist refuses to consume them because they look weird, and the antagonist insists he try them. In the end, he tries them and it turns out he loves them. The moral of the story is that you should try something before making a judgment on it.
Anyway, my point was that the analogy in the summary makes no sense whatsoever. I have no idea if it was cribbed from the original article or not because I didn't read the article because the summary was so bad, but whoever wrote it either had never actually read Green Eggs and Ham or somehow failed to grasp its message when they were 5 years old (or worse, failed to grasp its message when reading it to their own children).
Password length is far more important than number of possible characters in each position. Ignoring case in a password actually does not affect its cryptographic security in a meaningful way. Look it up.
So you don't like working with people who have different experiences than you and offer advice to other people (who are not you) on how to improve their experiences. You also like chiming in to respond for other people rather than letting them handle it. Got it. Lucky for you, we don't work together.
It was jarring at first after 20 years of white backgrounds, but I actually prefer the current image viewer behavior now that I've gotten used to it. It behaves more like an actual image viewer this way instead of like a web browser that also coincidentally loads images in the simplest way possible. As the other poster pointed out, the transparency issue is "fixed" in the next version (technically if your image has a transparent background, you shouldn't have any expectations about what color the background will be outside of its default location).
That's about all there is to it. Single player game with online coop. Their grandiose dreams of taking a slice of the WoW pie were about 5 years too late.
I can't agree that *anonymous* free speech is a right. It's a bit complicated, but if you can get away with anonymous speech, that's fine, but there should not be an *expectation* of anonymity. Say you write and publish a presumably anonymous pamphlet or something, and another person figures out who you are based on some clues or catching you in the act. If you had a *right* to anonymous speech, then it should be a crime for that person to reveal your identity. But it should not be a crime for that person to reveal your identity if they choose because that infringes too much on their right to free speech, and if you're writing something that, when tied to your identity, could bring into question your motives or reliability, then people should be able to know that in order to make sound decisions regarding your speech.
You might get less trolling (but not much less) but you'll miss out on a lot of extremely useful comments that can only be made anonymously or semi-anonymously. Some people are too shy or scared to speak out without anonymity, some just value their privacy. You'll almost never get insight from insiders at a company without some level of anonymity. Too much good value is lost for too small a reduction in bad comments, and bad comments can be controlled by good moderation anyway.
Once again, it's not the keyboard that makes KB/mouse superior, it's the mouse. Aiming is usually the most important function in a first person shooter, and the mouse is simply better at it. Almost all modern console FPS games have some fudging with aiming to make it easier on the gamepad because the developers understand its lack of precision.
Also about half of the precision of your movement is controlled by where you're aiming (with the mouse) anyway. If you want to see the kind of precision that can be accomplished with WASD, just look on youtube for quake 3 trick jumping videos. I'd like to see someone attempt that shit with a 360 controller.
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The account name posted is not what you use to login. If you created an account after the Battle.net 2.0 account merger, you have no way of even knowing what your own "account name" is.
This is pretty interesting, but I think the OP is trying to spread FUD about what the implications of this data are. There is no personally identifying information contained in this watermark. It contains the server IP, server time, and account name. That's it. Now there's a lot of confusion about what "account name" means, so let me explain it for those who don't know.
About the same time that this watermark apparently showed up (2008, the 3.0 patch associated with the WotLK expansion), Blizzard converted the WoW login system so that it was integrated with their new Battle.net 2.0 login system. At this time, it became necessary to login to WoW using your account's email address instead of your traditional account name. That traditional account name is what's being encoded into the watermark, not your email address login. If you created an account after the Battle.net 2.0 merger, then your "account name" is a unique string that isn't even display to its owner. Anywhere in the account management webpage or login screen that this string would appear, it instead displays "WoW1", "WoW2", etc. (if you have more than one account).
So there's basically no way to associate this "account name" with your login information, real identity, etc. If you play on a private server, that account name is going to be based on the private server's login system, not Blizzard's login system.
It's pretty obvious what the real purpose of these watermarks were: to identify users who violated the NDA of their closed betas and ban them from the beta, identify users attempting to sell their account, and possibly to identify the IP address of private servers to assist in attempting to shut them down.
Further, the probability that these info could be used to help harvest accounts for gold selling or to phish for accounts seems ridiculous. It'd be highly inefficient to spend so much time on a single user when for far less effort you could just spam a million harvested email addresses.
Whooosh.
Who is "everybody?" Godaddy.com hasn't been resolving for me since at least 1:30 PM EDT. It continues to not resolve for me now (5 PM EDT).
Armstrong's humility is part of what makes him so great.
Skyrim PC, while still exhibiting a lot of Bethesda's traditional AI goofiness, is the most stable Bethesda game I've ever played, even before it had any patches. I completely understand your trepidation after Oblivion/FO3/NV, but as long as you don't get the PS3 version, Skyrim is actually pretty damn solid. Part of that is likely due to them moving to their own game engine rather than continuing to rely on Gamebryo.
At one point during the Steam summer sale, Skyrim was ~$30. I'd expect a similar (or better) price drop on Steam either during Black Friday or just after Christmas.
Actually, this is impossible. By the time we attempt to bring back an extinct species, another species is likely to have moved in and filled its niche. This other species was the genetic "winner" and we'd be bringing back the genetic "loser." The entire ecology of their habitat will likely have been shaken up and rebalanced (or on the road to rebalancing).
You can't just go: "Well, when we started recording data we estimated the population to be 300, so let's clone 300 of them and drop them out of a helicopter." Especially not if it's a higher order mammal or bird, because those species are likely to also have had a set of learned behaviors that the clones would no longer posses and we might have no way of knowing. Further, it's unlikely we'll have a large enough genetic sample to actually reintroduce a *population*. At best we'd be introducing a set of slightly genetically varied clones, who, depending on their mutation rate, would be inbred and be killed off again by the next minor upper respiratory disease.
And finally, the idea of genetically modifying them to be "less threatening to humans" just proves the writer of the article is an idiot and has no idea what she's talking about. If you modify a species to not be threatening to humans, you've modified it to also not be threatening to its prey or its predators. You haven't brought the species back, you've just created a new artificial species that's less viable and less able to defend itself. You've set it up to fail from the start.
There was nothing anti-science about Jurassic Park. Taking a scientific discovery and making a fucking theme park out of it for profit without any idea of the repercussions was the problem in the book, not the genetic engineering on its own.
Most high end raiding guilds only "grind" long enough to finish their sets or get their mounts or whatever, and then take a break until the next expansion. Only the bad players who can't finish the dungeons "grind" the parts they can complete until Blizzard nerfs the content enough for them to finish it.
As a kid I had a subscription to Ninteno Power from like 1990 until 1998. Sad to see it go but I honestly hadn't looked at an issue since then. The internet (and me not being a kid, as it was clearly marketed at the 10-16 year old demographic) made it totally irrelevant. I'm honestly surprised it managed to stick around this long.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. I haven't read it in over 20 years (possibly 25). The reason I know that at the end of the book they taste good is because that's the entire point of the book. The protagonist refuses to consume them because they look weird, and the antagonist insists he try them. In the end, he tries them and it turns out he loves them. The moral of the story is that you should try something before making a judgment on it.
Anyway, my point was that the analogy in the summary makes no sense whatsoever. I have no idea if it was cribbed from the original article or not because I didn't read the article because the summary was so bad, but whoever wrote it either had never actually read Green Eggs and Ham or somehow failed to grasp its message when they were 5 years old (or worse, failed to grasp its message when reading it to their own children).
Terrible analogy. If you actually read Green Eggs and Ham to the end it turns out they taste awesome.
Password length is far more important than number of possible characters in each position. Ignoring case in a password actually does not affect its cryptographic security in a meaningful way. Look it up.
So you don't like working with people who have different experiences than you and offer advice to other people (who are not you) on how to improve their experiences. You also like chiming in to respond for other people rather than letting them handle it. Got it. Lucky for you, we don't work together.
I've literally never had this problem, and I never close my Firefox instance. Stop using shitty extensions.
It was jarring at first after 20 years of white backgrounds, but I actually prefer the current image viewer behavior now that I've gotten used to it. It behaves more like an actual image viewer this way instead of like a web browser that also coincidentally loads images in the simplest way possible. As the other poster pointed out, the transparency issue is "fixed" in the next version (technically if your image has a transparent background, you shouldn't have any expectations about what color the background will be outside of its default location).
I'm dismayed that my other ESDF homies all posted AC. Stand proud, brothers!
That's about all there is to it. Single player game with online coop. Their grandiose dreams of taking a slice of the WoW pie were about 5 years too late.
I can't agree that *anonymous* free speech is a right. It's a bit complicated, but if you can get away with anonymous speech, that's fine, but there should not be an *expectation* of anonymity. Say you write and publish a presumably anonymous pamphlet or something, and another person figures out who you are based on some clues or catching you in the act. If you had a *right* to anonymous speech, then it should be a crime for that person to reveal your identity. But it should not be a crime for that person to reveal your identity if they choose because that infringes too much on their right to free speech, and if you're writing something that, when tied to your identity, could bring into question your motives or reliability, then people should be able to know that in order to make sound decisions regarding your speech.
You might get less trolling (but not much less) but you'll miss out on a lot of extremely useful comments that can only be made anonymously or semi-anonymously. Some people are too shy or scared to speak out without anonymity, some just value their privacy. You'll almost never get insight from insiders at a company without some level of anonymity. Too much good value is lost for too small a reduction in bad comments, and bad comments can be controlled by good moderation anyway.
Once again, it's not the keyboard that makes KB/mouse superior, it's the mouse. Aiming is usually the most important function in a first person shooter, and the mouse is simply better at it. Almost all modern console FPS games have some fudging with aiming to make it easier on the gamepad because the developers understand its lack of precision.
Also about half of the precision of your movement is controlled by where you're aiming (with the mouse) anyway. If you want to see the kind of precision that can be accomplished with WASD, just look on youtube for quake 3 trick jumping videos. I'd like to see someone attempt that shit with a 360 controller.
They're also suing Square Enix, EA, and Gameloft (basically everyone).
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/365540/20120721/minecraft-notch-mojang-lawsuit-patent-troll-software.htm
And yet Pac-man was, and still is, an awesome game with NO STORY WHATSOEVER.
Play The Walking Dead game.