Sorry, but I don't have time to read Slashdot all day, and therefore, am not interested in reading through (or downloading) a whole bunch of silly, dumb, offtopic, insulting, bullheaded, or just plain uninformed posts. Until recently, I set my threshold at 2, only just now turned down to 1. I view the moderation system as very effective, and am quite pleased with the quality of the information I read. Incidentally, this thread was moderated up to 2, so...
I agree that the definition of 'violation of privacy' is difficult to agree upon, but personally, I think that this is not. I would gladly surrender the amount of hard disk space, processor speed, video card model, internet connection type, or such information, which does not reveal anything about myself or whatever I might be up to, would be an acceptable 'price' for a game. What possible sinister use could id have with the knowledge that a user at such-and-such an IP address has a Diamond Viper V770? Is there a conspiracy to do x with the information that 1378 people who play Q3A have a TNT card? It seems to me that you are losing much more privacy by giving away your e-mail address here on slashdot, where there are - of course - a lot of evil, evil people out to get you!
Would you want to punish a company that's supporting Linux? It seems that you are raising a lesser evil over a greater good- a tiny violation of your privacy, which I can certainly live with, over id's support of Linux gaming, which I view as a tremendous good.
It seems to me that this information is far more beneficial than the imagined violation of privacy. While I agree that they should have told us about this 'feature,' information like what he's describing can lead to evidence of a Linux market- 5% is a lot when dealing with the numbers of something like Quake- and also to better support- they know to tell people not to use minidrivers or to run glsetup, or whatever. I think people are overreacting.
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Sorry, but I don't have time to read Slashdot all day, and therefore, am not interested in reading through (or downloading) a whole bunch of silly, dumb, offtopic, insulting, bullheaded, or just plain uninformed posts. Until recently, I set my threshold at 2, only just now turned down to 1. I view the moderation system as very effective, and am quite pleased with the quality of the information I read. Incidentally, this thread was moderated up to 2, so...
I agree that the definition of 'violation of privacy' is difficult to agree upon, but personally, I think that this is not. I would gladly surrender the amount of hard disk space, processor speed, video card model, internet connection type, or such information, which does not reveal anything about myself or whatever I might be up to, would be an acceptable 'price' for a game. What possible sinister use could id have with the knowledge that a user at such-and-such an IP address has a Diamond Viper V770? Is there a conspiracy to do x with the information that 1378 people who play Q3A have a TNT card? It seems to me that you are losing much more privacy by giving away your e-mail address here on slashdot, where there are - of course - a lot of evil, evil people out to get you!
Would you want to punish a company that's supporting Linux? It seems that you are raising a lesser evil over a greater good- a tiny violation of your privacy, which I can certainly live with, over id's support of Linux gaming, which I view as a tremendous good.
It seems to me that this information is far more beneficial than the imagined violation of privacy. While I agree that they should have told us about this 'feature,' information like what he's describing can lead to evidence of a Linux market- 5% is a lot when dealing with the numbers of something like Quake- and also to better support- they know to tell people not to use minidrivers or to run glsetup, or whatever. I think people are overreacting.