Obviously IANAL, but hypothetically, if the requested sanctions had been granted, would that not also give the ISP a reason to not sign such an agreement with the RIAA (or possibly even to break such an agreement)?
After all, if an individual could not be prosecuted based on an IP address, then presumably the ISP couldn't be held responsible for not divulging an IP address or disconnecting based on an IP address. In other words, not working with the RIAA would cost the ISP less than working with them.
Here in Australia, a hardcover costs AUD$55 now - and that's a hardcover that's designed to fall apart after 2 years or 4 readings. A (normal-sized) paperback costs AUD$20-25.
I used to buy an incredible number of books, and well over half of those were hardcover. Now I only buy the books I really really really want, and I only buy paperbacks. Paperbacks are considerably cheaper (though still expensive) and they tend to last a lot longer. I know, ridiculous, isn't it? The whole point of a hardcover is that it should last longer than the paperback.
I now spend a lot less money on books than I used to (and I have more disposable income now), because the publishers got greedy and took the opportunity of the GST being introduced to increase the cost of books astronomically. As a result, I don't get exposed to as many authors as I used to, because I don't buy on spec anymore - I stick with authors that I know I've enjoyed reading in the past. That means that very few new authors get any of my money.
Make books more affordable and accessible to people, and both publishers and authors will make more money. This obviously applies to audio books as well.
"German measles" is Rubella. It is not the same disease as measles. I'm guessing that's why the term "german measles" fell out of favour - too many people confusing it with measles.
No - Minchin does not have any sense. It's just the "broken clock" principle at work here - the government's position is *so* wrong, that the opposition's default position of denigrating *anything* the government does (or proposes) happens to be right.
BTW, the current government was much the same when they were in opposition - in fact, their lack of *effective* opposition was a major reason they were in opposition so long. The NSW Liberal/National coalition (the conservatives) are in the same position - the current NSW government should have easily lost the last two elections, but the opposition has been so inept that Labor has won by default each time. I'm a socialist, but I would have voted for the Libs in NSW if they'd been able to put *any* kind of effective opposition together.
Of course, the majority of what Johnny's government did was wrong on so many levels. Johnny had a plan to turn us into his ideal "nasty society", and to a large extent it worked. It's going to take a long time for the healing.
This definitely isn't the perception that Australians have of US media in general - the perception is rather that the vast majority of US media is heavily biased towards the conservative side of things. Of course, the visibility of Fox may have something to do with that.
If even Fox is appearing to be biased towards Obama (and that's what it looked like to me during the election coverage) it suggests that there's a good reason he garnered the majority of positive press during the campaign, other than "liberal bias". I'd suggest he "touched a nerve" or "looked like a breath of fresh wind" or some other platitude like that.
If Obama makes it to 8 years, I fully expect the media to have turned on him. I'm just hoping it's *not* because he got the world involved in wars that should never have happened, or idiotic policies that detrimentally affect the rest of the world. OTOH, if he does either of those things, I hope the media rip him to shreds - preferably early enough that the damage can be mitigated.
Disclaimer: I'm basically a socialist - I believe there should be a minimum level of protection for *everyone* - health care, wages, etc. If someone is able to do better than that (which is the situation I'm in), good on them - but they should expect to contribute more to assist those who need it.
Yes, there are plans better than what I'm on. Unfortunately, I'm pair-gained (tried churning to iiNet a year or so ago, and got totally screwed over by Telstra). Fortunately, ISPs are rolling out their own DSLAMs so that plans like the TPG one you're obviously describing are becoming available to more and more people. Not me though.
Given the choice, I would be elsewhere - but it doesn't change the fact that the plan I'm on is good value for money (apart from the pitiful upload). It's not the best value for money - but it's in the ballpark.
Disclaimer: I'm on what is considered a very good plan for Australia. Optus Cable, 20GB peak/40GB off-peak (off-peak is 12 midnight to 12 noon), 10Mbps down/256kbps up (though in practice it's really about 7Mbps down). After all my peak usage is used I get shaped to 64kbps down/up (and my extra off-peak becomes unavailable). If I use up all my off-peak it starts taking from my peak usage. No free sites - all traffic counts towards my usage no matter the source. I pay about AU$70/month for this service (which BTW is very reliable - my only real issue with it is the pitiful upload speed). It's a grandfathered plan - you can't get it anymore but I'm allowed to stay on it - the new plans are much less friendly (value for money for net access has been trending downwards in Australia over the last few years).
I find your definition of "application" strange - I would have thought "application" would refer to type of traffic, rather than source.
I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type, just I do at my end. I use cFosSpeed to prioritise real-time applications (VOIP) highest, things requiring low latency (e.g. web browsing) next, and things which aren't particularly time-dependent lowest (e.g. downloads, P2P).
Most of the time, P2P runs at full speed, because there's nothing else going on. But as soon as something else starts using the net, P2P slows down - and then quickly speeds up again as soon as the higher-priority activity stops.
I'd love ISPs to do the same thing, so my VOIP calls were at the highest priority end-to-end. ISPs should never prevent any type of traffic, but I'm very happy for them to reduce the performance of applications that are not significantly time-dependent so that significantly time-dependent traffic is preferred. I'll still get my downloads - it'll just take a little longer.
I'd also be in favour of per-megabyte charging, so long as it's at a reasonable rate (not $150/GB as Telstra charges for excess usage!), and that you can set a cap after which you get shaped to low speeds, at which point you have to go to a secure web site and set a new cap for that month only (or something along those lines).
Fall^H^H^H^HOblivion with Guns. Sometimes it's a good idea to appease the fanboys, because the previous games are already damn fun and well designed.
In the case of Diablo III though, I've looked at Blizzard's reasoning, and compared the images, and overall I think Blizzard has made the right choice. The basic gameplay doesn't appear to have greatly changed - this is nitpicking over a small change in look.
Plus I trust Leonard Boyarsky. He says the colour palette changes in later parts of the game. Kinda like going from pre-Searing Ascalon to post-Searing to Kryta in Guild Wars.
That's the problem right there. In the US, the person *receiving* the message pays for part of it. In sensible countries (like Australia), the person *sending* the message bears the full cost - there is zero charge to receive a message.
As a result, there is a *lot* less SMS spam in Australia.
I'm the family support guy, and already had them all with shortcuts specifying https, but I just logged into each of their accounts and configured them to always use https (now the option is available).
Primarily anime, but other stuff as well. What I tend to do is use mencoder to trancode the source material (usually h264/x264/XviD) to Huffyuv video/PCM audio (single episode goes from 150MB to 7GB!), then use VirtualDub to add hard subtitles and encode as XviD (using ffdshow-tryouts). I do the mencoder bit because if you've got a VBR audio stream, it's quite likely to end up out of sync (esp. coming from a Matroska container) if you use VirtualDubMod to extract the streams. So I don't. Can't remember the parameters I pass to mencoder off the top of my head.
I don't tend to do this much nowadays though as I've got one of my machines running TVersity (DLNA server) and transcoding and subtitling on-the-fly to stream to my PS3 (using ffdshow-tryouts filters). I now only do it if I need to play something on an XviD-compatible DVD player, or it's only got VobSub subtitles (ffdshow-tryouts has a bug where it will only display the very first line in the subtitles).
Try the latest ffdshow-tryouts H.264 encoder (take the latest SVN build, or beta 5 which has just come out) and see how you go.
You don't say if you're running on Windows or Linux or something else. If you are running on Windows, the latest versions of VirtualDub have made big improvements to SMT/SMP encoding.
Make sure you grab 1.8.3 - 1.8.1 was pretty good, but had a few teething problems. 1.8.2 has a major regression which is fixed in 1.8.3. The comments in the 1.8.1 announcement contain a few important tips for using the new features (some of which I posted BTW).
The two major new features that would be of interest to you are:
1. You can run all VirtualDub processing in one thread, and the codec in another. This works very well in conjunction with a multi-threaded codec - this one change improved my CPU utilitisation from approx 75% to 95% on my dual-core machines - with an equivalent increase in encoding performance.
2. VD now has simple support for distributed encoding. You can use a shared queue across either multiple instances of VD on a single machine, or across multiple machines (must use UNC paths for multiple machines). Each instance of VD will pick the next job in the queue when it finishes its current job. Instances can be started in slave mode (in which case they will automatically start processing the queue).
I use 3 machines for encoding (all dual-core). With VD 1.8.x I start VD on two of the machines in slave mode, and one in master mode. I add jobs to the queue on the master instance, and the other two instances immediately pick up the new jobs and start encoding. When I've added all the jobs, I then start the master instance working on the job queue.
To achieve a similar effect on your quad-code, start two instances of VD on the same machine - one slave, the other master.
It's not perfect (if you've only got one job, you won't use your maximum capacity) but it has greatly simplified my transcoding tasks, and reduced the time to transcode large numbers of files.
if (condition) {
true_branch } else {
false_branch }
(even on a 512x384 original Mac screen) but have no significant complaints with:
if (condition) {
true_branch } else {
false_branch }
I find the first easier to read even though as a python programmer I find that for multiple statements in a branch, the following (which matches the above) is easiest to read:
if condition:
true_branch_statement
true_branch_statement
true_branch_statement
If there's only a single statement I prefer to put the else: hard against the true_branch:
if condition:
true_branch else:
false_branch
I hate the GNU style with a passion:
if (condition)
{
true_branch
} else
{
false_branch
}
Any brace style that puts the brace on the same line as any statement of either branch is just asking for trouble - way too easy to select a line and delete or move it, and in the process totally messing up the logic.
Or maybe a driver with a race condition in it? Or how about one that writes to an uninitialised pointer. Maybe 99.99% of the time, it will get lucky, but that 0.01% can kill you. Remember - drivers tend to run in kernel space, giving them much greater ability to cause serious issues (including BSOD).
Of course, the same can happen (and has) on pretty much any platform - but the more complicate the platform, the more likely it is to occur.
So there's no energy in a tide? I'm sure everyone who's been caught in a rip tide will agree with you.
The energy calculations have to include all sources of energy. The total amount of energy required to lift a weight can never be less than the amount of kinetic energy released when dropping the weight back to its original position under our current understanding of physics.
Sure - but at 4000 euros, you can afford to do a one-off purchase and write custom software for a limited application. The point of this is that if your application suits it, this is a very cheap way to get supercomputer performance without paying for your own supercomputer (cluster) or time on an existing one.
Definitely look at DD-WRT if your router is supported (depends on the version).
As an alternative, or additional measure, if he is running Windows, and if he will let you install something on his PC which will not significantly affect his downloading (and might improve it overall), but will definitely improve things for the rest of the network, download the 30-day trial of cFosSpeed and install it on his machine (running in multi-computer, non-cooperative mode).
BTW, I paid for cFosSpeed after having it installed for 2 days - it's well and truly worth the 9 euros IMO, even if you've already got a traffic-shaping router (it tends to reduce the load on your router).
One way to get him to agree to try it is by telling him that it will allow him to play online games and do other online activities while downloading (this is true) and at the same time will allow him to increase his maximum upload speed in his P2P program (since cFosSpeed prioritises TCP ACKs).
If he's running linux, you can set up local traffic shaping yourself, but you'll have to go searching how.
The main thing for this though is to point out to him that this will improve the internet connection for everyone, including himself.
You may well be happier in Guild Wars - don't have to worry about any of these complications. It's a much more casual game (from all accounts - I haven't played WoW, but I've got friends who do). Plus GW is a one-off cost (per campaign/expansion).
Of course, I'm in a small guild of just friends and family, and "guild activities" aren't a big thing - if we're online at the same time, we'll work together.
For an opposing anecdote, my family had 3 fairly new drives fail within 3 months of each other - 1 Seagate (approx 1 year old), 1 Samsung (approx 6 months old) and 1 Western Digital (3 weeks old).
During this period, I learned not to buy WD drives in Australia again - whereas Seagate and Samsung handle warranty returns locally, and each took about 3 days to get a new drive to me, WD wanted me to send the drive to Singapore, and estimated a 4-week turnaround. Fortunately, I was able to convince the retailer to take it back (for a restocking fee), and was able to buy the same-sized Samsung for less than the modified refund.
OTOH, I've still got 8GB drives that work just fine.
OTGH, I bought 2 IBM Deathstars (75GXP) several years ago (at the same time, presumably the same batch) - one died very quickly, but the other is still in use today.
One of the claims (not in the linked article) is that she did not accept the money - BB unilaterally credited her card, and sent her a $500 gift certificate which she donated to a non-profit. BB is spinning that she "accepted" the payment.
Funds received to date total $1110.35, which were unilaterally transferred into my credit card account by Best Buy in late October -- without my knowledge or consent. The amount does not even cover the full cost of replacing the laptop itself, let alone a fraction of the value of the music, pictures, software, and other contents that were on the stolen computer, legal and court expenses, the cost of identity theft protection services that I am forced to bear for years to come, or compensation for the estimated 200 hours I have spent since May dealing with Best Buy and its agents, the replacement of my computer and its contents, and pursuing the lawsuit because of Best Buy's indifference towards my initial requests. Best Buy also sent a $500 gift card to me in mid-October (with no explanation and despite repeatedly communicating that I had no interest in a gift card that would force me to patronize their stores). I subsequently advised them that I would donate it to a non-profit organization unless they requested its return, and did so in December, after not receiving a response.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously IANAL, but hypothetically, if the requested sanctions had been granted, would that not also give the ISP a reason to not sign such an agreement with the RIAA (or possibly even to break such an agreement)?
After all, if an individual could not be prosecuted based on an IP address, then presumably the ISP couldn't be held responsible for not divulging an IP address or disconnecting based on an IP address. In other words, not working with the RIAA would cost the ISP less than working with them.
Here in Australia, a hardcover costs AUD$55 now - and that's a hardcover that's designed to fall apart after 2 years or 4 readings. A (normal-sized) paperback costs AUD$20-25.
I used to buy an incredible number of books, and well over half of those were hardcover. Now I only buy the books I really really really want, and I only buy paperbacks. Paperbacks are considerably cheaper (though still expensive) and they tend to last a lot longer. I know, ridiculous, isn't it? The whole point of a hardcover is that it should last longer than the paperback.
I now spend a lot less money on books than I used to (and I have more disposable income now), because the publishers got greedy and took the opportunity of the GST being introduced to increase the cost of books astronomically. As a result, I don't get exposed to as many authors as I used to, because I don't buy on spec anymore - I stick with authors that I know I've enjoyed reading in the past. That means that very few new authors get any of my money.
Make books more affordable and accessible to people, and both publishers and authors will make more money. This obviously applies to audio books as well.
"German measles" is Rubella. It is not the same disease as measles. I'm guessing that's why the term "german measles" fell out of favour - too many people confusing it with measles.
No - Minchin does not have any sense. It's just the "broken clock" principle at work here - the government's position is *so* wrong, that the opposition's default position of denigrating *anything* the government does (or proposes) happens to be right.
BTW, the current government was much the same when they were in opposition - in fact, their lack of *effective* opposition was a major reason they were in opposition so long. The NSW Liberal/National coalition (the conservatives) are in the same position - the current NSW government should have easily lost the last two elections, but the opposition has been so inept that Labor has won by default each time. I'm a socialist, but I would have voted for the Libs in NSW if they'd been able to put *any* kind of effective opposition together.
Of course, the majority of what Johnny's government did was wrong on so many levels. Johnny had a plan to turn us into his ideal "nasty society", and to a large extent it worked. It's going to take a long time for the healing.
Duck!
Ranma 1/2. Look at the cast of characters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD#Characters
This definitely isn't the perception that Australians have of US media in general - the perception is rather that the vast majority of US media is heavily biased towards the conservative side of things. Of course, the visibility of Fox may have something to do with that.
If even Fox is appearing to be biased towards Obama (and that's what it looked like to me during the election coverage) it suggests that there's a good reason he garnered the majority of positive press during the campaign, other than "liberal bias". I'd suggest he "touched a nerve" or "looked like a breath of fresh wind" or some other platitude like that.
If Obama makes it to 8 years, I fully expect the media to have turned on him. I'm just hoping it's *not* because he got the world involved in wars that should never have happened, or idiotic policies that detrimentally affect the rest of the world. OTOH, if he does either of those things, I hope the media rip him to shreds - preferably early enough that the damage can be mitigated.
Disclaimer: I'm basically a socialist - I believe there should be a minimum level of protection for *everyone* - health care, wages, etc. If someone is able to do better than that (which is the situation I'm in), good on them - but they should expect to contribute more to assist those who need it.
Strong vs weak, static vs dynamic typing
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=7590
Plus add explicit vs implicit (explicit almost always means static, implicit can be either).
Yes, there are plans better than what I'm on. Unfortunately, I'm pair-gained (tried churning to iiNet a year or so ago, and got totally screwed over by Telstra). Fortunately, ISPs are rolling out their own DSLAMs so that plans like the TPG one you're obviously describing are becoming available to more and more people. Not me though.
Given the choice, I would be elsewhere - but it doesn't change the fact that the plan I'm on is good value for money (apart from the pitiful upload). It's not the best value for money - but it's in the ballpark.
Disclaimer: I'm on what is considered a very good plan for Australia. Optus Cable, 20GB peak/40GB off-peak (off-peak is 12 midnight to 12 noon), 10Mbps down/256kbps up (though in practice it's really about 7Mbps down). After all my peak usage is used I get shaped to 64kbps down/up (and my extra off-peak becomes unavailable). If I use up all my off-peak it starts taking from my peak usage. No free sites - all traffic counts towards my usage no matter the source. I pay about AU$70/month for this service (which BTW is very reliable - my only real issue with it is the pitiful upload speed). It's a grandfathered plan - you can't get it anymore but I'm allowed to stay on it - the new plans are much less friendly (value for money for net access has been trending downwards in Australia over the last few years).
I find your definition of "application" strange - I would have thought "application" would refer to type of traffic, rather than source.
I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type, just I do at my end. I use cFosSpeed to prioritise real-time applications (VOIP) highest, things requiring low latency (e.g. web browsing) next, and things which aren't particularly time-dependent lowest (e.g. downloads, P2P).
Most of the time, P2P runs at full speed, because there's nothing else going on. But as soon as something else starts using the net, P2P slows down - and then quickly speeds up again as soon as the higher-priority activity stops.
I'd love ISPs to do the same thing, so my VOIP calls were at the highest priority end-to-end. ISPs should never prevent any type of traffic, but I'm very happy for them to reduce the performance of applications that are not significantly time-dependent so that significantly time-dependent traffic is preferred. I'll still get my downloads - it'll just take a little longer.
I'd also be in favour of per-megabyte charging, so long as it's at a reasonable rate (not $150/GB as Telstra charges for excess usage!), and that you can set a cap after which you get shaped to low speeds, at which point you have to go to a secure web site and set a new cap for that month only (or something along those lines).
Fall^H^H^H^HOblivion with Guns. Sometimes it's a good idea to appease the fanboys, because the previous games are already damn fun and well designed.
In the case of Diablo III though, I've looked at Blizzard's reasoning, and compared the images, and overall I think Blizzard has made the right choice. The basic gameplay doesn't appear to have greatly changed - this is nitpicking over a small change in look.
Plus I trust Leonard Boyarsky. He says the colour palette changes in later parts of the game. Kinda like going from pre-Searing Ascalon to post-Searing to Kryta in Guild Wars.
Which is why I said the person receiving pays for *part* of the charge in the US ... i.e. both the sender and receiver pay part of it.
And I'm not going to post this same message to each reply that misunderstood my original post.
That's the problem right there. In the US, the person *receiving* the message pays for part of it. In sensible countries (like Australia), the person *sending* the message bears the full cost - there is zero charge to receive a message.
As a result, there is a *lot* less SMS spam in Australia.
I'm the family support guy, and already had them all with shortcuts specifying https, but I just logged into each of their accounts and configured them to always use https (now the option is available).
Primarily anime, but other stuff as well. What I tend to do is use mencoder to trancode the source material (usually h264/x264/XviD) to Huffyuv video/PCM audio (single episode goes from 150MB to 7GB!), then use VirtualDub to add hard subtitles and encode as XviD (using ffdshow-tryouts). I do the mencoder bit because if you've got a VBR audio stream, it's quite likely to end up out of sync (esp. coming from a Matroska container) if you use VirtualDubMod to extract the streams. So I don't. Can't remember the parameters I pass to mencoder off the top of my head.
I don't tend to do this much nowadays though as I've got one of my machines running TVersity (DLNA server) and transcoding and subtitling on-the-fly to stream to my PS3 (using ffdshow-tryouts filters). I now only do it if I need to play something on an XviD-compatible DVD player, or it's only got VobSub subtitles (ffdshow-tryouts has a bug where it will only display the very first line in the subtitles).
Try the latest ffdshow-tryouts H.264 encoder (take the latest SVN build, or beta 5 which has just come out) and see how you go.
You don't say if you're running on Windows or Linux or something else. If you are running on Windows, the latest versions of VirtualDub have made big improvements to SMT/SMP encoding.
VirtualDub home
VirtualDub 1.8.1 announcement
VirtualDub downloads
Make sure you grab 1.8.3 - 1.8.1 was pretty good, but had a few teething problems. 1.8.2 has a major regression which is fixed in 1.8.3. The comments in the 1.8.1 announcement contain a few important tips for using the new features (some of which I posted BTW).
The two major new features that would be of interest to you are:
1. You can run all VirtualDub processing in one thread, and the codec in another. This works very well in conjunction with a multi-threaded codec - this one change improved my CPU utilitisation from approx 75% to 95% on my dual-core machines - with an equivalent increase in encoding performance.
2. VD now has simple support for distributed encoding. You can use a shared queue across either multiple instances of VD on a single machine, or across multiple machines (must use UNC paths for multiple machines). Each instance of VD will pick the next job in the queue when it finishes its current job. Instances can be started in slave mode (in which case they will automatically start processing the queue).
I use 3 machines for encoding (all dual-core). With VD 1.8.x I start VD on two of the machines in slave mode, and one in master mode. I add jobs to the queue on the master instance, and the other two instances immediately pick up the new jobs and start encoding. When I've added all the jobs, I then start the master instance working on the job queue.
To achieve a similar effect on your quad-code, start two instances of VD on the same machine - one slave, the other master.
It's not perfect (if you've only got one job, you won't use your maximum capacity) but it has greatly simplified my transcoding tasks, and reduced the time to transcode large numbers of files.
I've always used (and prefer):
(even on a 512x384 original Mac screen) but have no significant complaints with:
I find the first easier to read even though as a python programmer I find that for multiple statements in a branch, the following (which matches the above) is easiest to read:
If there's only a single statement I prefer to put the else: hard against the true_branch:
I hate the GNU style with a passion:
Any brace style that puts the brace on the same line as any statement of either branch is just asking for trouble - way too easy to select a line and delete or move it, and in the process totally messing up the logic.
Or maybe a driver with a race condition in it? Or how about one that writes to an uninitialised pointer. Maybe 99.99% of the time, it will get lucky, but that 0.01% can kill you. Remember - drivers tend to run in kernel space, giving them much greater ability to cause serious issues (including BSOD).
Of course, the same can happen (and has) on pretty much any platform - but the more complicate the platform, the more likely it is to occur.
So there's no energy in a tide? I'm sure everyone who's been caught in a rip tide will agree with you.
The energy calculations have to include all sources of energy. The total amount of energy required to lift a weight can never be less than the amount of kinetic energy released when dropping the weight back to its original position under our current understanding of physics.
Sure - but at 4000 euros, you can afford to do a one-off purchase and write custom software for a limited application. The point of this is that if your application suits it, this is a very cheap way to get supercomputer performance without paying for your own supercomputer (cluster) or time on an existing one.
"Sufficiently" seems to be "no copy protection" - just a good game.
Sins of a Solar Empire
Definitely look at DD-WRT if your router is supported (depends on the version).
As an alternative, or additional measure, if he is running Windows, and if he will let you install something on his PC which will not significantly affect his downloading (and might improve it overall), but will definitely improve things for the rest of the network, download the 30-day trial of cFosSpeed and install it on his machine (running in multi-computer, non-cooperative mode).
http://www.cfos.de/speed/cfosspeed_e.htm
BTW, I paid for cFosSpeed after having it installed for 2 days - it's well and truly worth the 9 euros IMO, even if you've already got a traffic-shaping router (it tends to reduce the load on your router).
One way to get him to agree to try it is by telling him that it will allow him to play online games and do other online activities while downloading (this is true) and at the same time will allow him to increase his maximum upload speed in his P2P program (since cFosSpeed prioritises TCP ACKs).
If he's running linux, you can set up local traffic shaping yourself, but you'll have to go searching how.
The main thing for this though is to point out to him that this will improve the internet connection for everyone, including himself.
You may well be happier in Guild Wars - don't have to worry about any of these complications. It's a much more casual game (from all accounts - I haven't played WoW, but I've got friends who do). Plus GW is a one-off cost (per campaign/expansion).
Of course, I'm in a small guild of just friends and family, and "guild activities" aren't a big thing - if we're online at the same time, we'll work together.
For an opposing anecdote, my family had 3 fairly new drives fail within 3 months of each other - 1 Seagate (approx 1 year old), 1 Samsung (approx 6 months old) and 1 Western Digital (3 weeks old).
During this period, I learned not to buy WD drives in Australia again - whereas Seagate and Samsung handle warranty returns locally, and each took about 3 days to get a new drive to me, WD wanted me to send the drive to Singapore, and estimated a 4-week turnaround. Fortunately, I was able to convince the retailer to take it back (for a restocking fee), and was able to buy the same-sized Samsung for less than the modified refund.
OTOH, I've still got 8GB drives that work just fine.
OTGH, I bought 2 IBM Deathstars (75GXP) several years ago (at the same time, presumably the same batch) - one died very quickly, but the other is still in use today.
One of the claims (not in the linked article) is that she did not accept the money - BB unilaterally credited her card, and sent her a $500 gift certificate which she donated to a non-profit. BB is spinning that she "accepted" the payment.
From her blog