I was absentmindedly browsing the front page while doing something else on the other screen, and still had the summary for this Ask Slashdot in my mind when I started reading the comments for this story. Boy, did you ever look like an asshole for a second there!
Like all innovative things, the original has served its purpose, and been laid to rest. From the ashes, not one, but many successors rise. And inevitably, one will bear the name of its father - even if, like present-day Napster or Atari, it is at best a shambling husk of a brand compared to the original.
Odds are pretty good that a major pandemic will prove to be the solution.
I'm convinced that the collective intelligence of the viral and bacterial comunnities exceeds that of our species.
Actually, if that happened, they'd have proved themselves equal, at best. Shortly after, the viral and bacterial communities would be having discussions on "peak human."
Not entirely true! I once had PSU make a horrible buzzing noise while all the magic blue smoke escaped... and then start up again just fine. I continued to use it for several months until one day it simply ceased to function, with naught but the faint smell of burning dielectrics to mark its passing.
Superhero origins are far more representative, actually. Consider: Spiderman and the Hulk both get their powers from radiation in the 60s, and from genetic engineering in their more recent movie versions.
If this becomes widespread, here's how it'll go: first, pirate groups will only have to pay for/obtain a couple extra copies, and come up with an automated reconstruction system that will compare the copies and perform error correction. Then the publishers will start obfuscating things more and more, and the pirate groups will develop more and more advanced algorithms. Eventually, the publishers will be publishing near-100% noise, with their heads too far up their asses to realize it, the only people buying copies will be the dedicated pirate groups, who will afford it by charging for their services, and before you know it, "content miners" will just be another step in the chain. The establishment is just last generation's rebels, am I right?
What MMO, at all, isn't a monotonous grindfest? WoW doesn't count, because it doesn't matter if I'm gathering gold or Mithril, I'm still grinding the shit.
Understand that when I say that, I mean "relative to Western MMOs." You can go grinding in WoW, yes, but you can also play without doing it, or at least without doing it to any excessive degree (unless you're one of those people who defines "grinding" as "performing any actions to advance your character", in which case why are you playing WoW?). Asian MMOs, though, really take it to another level.
If a game doesn't allow solo play, then the corollary is you need a group to do anything. Groups can be hard to assemble and coordinate - sometimes it takes a while to get going, and sometimes you just don't feel like dealing with it, even if you normally enjoy it. If you can't do anything useful ungrouped, then why bother logging in for anything other than a scheduled guild raid? And if you're logging in that infrequently, why keep logging in at all? This is the downward spiral of a strictly group-only MMO.
The distinguishing characteristics, as I understand it, are typically A) free to play, supported by micropayments for vanity stuff, and B) monotonous grindfests.
Why is this interesting? The guy isn't selling the data itself. You pay your fee, and he tells you "yes, your SSN and CC # are out on the internets." If you were targeting a particular person, this might be a useful first step in determining whether to try buying some bulk lists, but it (the service, not the list) probably has little black hat application beyond that.
...I think that a lot of people would rather pay a reasonable, and cheaper rate, for bandwidth they use than pay more for a theoretically uncapped amount that they won't use.
I don't think I'm the only one who typically finds Blizzard's jokes to be at least as exciting as their real news. Strip away just a little bit of the extra silliness and I would love to play a bard, or a two-headed ogre, or have a pimped-out mount.
I suspect there are more professional researchers who agree with you than you might think. There are some reasons why not many people are doing this, however. First and most importantly, it's fairly easy to show that we can't currently build a computer that can match the processing power of a human brain. We may be there in another decade or two, and we may be able to shave some time off of that by cutting corners and designing more efficient systems (but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting that nature's a lot better at that than we are). At any rate, assume we overcome that eventually. The human brain isn't just a blank slate. I'm too lazy to annotate a/. post with citations, but I know there's research out there that suggests that newborn children already have the ability to do tasks like facial recognition and filtering human voices out of background noise. Those are nontrivial tasks for a modern software system with training, and they do it without. In so many ways, the brain is still a black box with all kinds of pre-programmed abilities, and until that's fully deciphered you probably won't be able to train a blank slate statistical engine to act like one. Even if it did work eventually, it's fairly intuitive that it would develop more slowly than a human child, and who's going to commit to funding 10 years of such an uncertain project?
having a crappy client that is so lacking in so many respects that add-ons are at minimum an appreciable comfort
You mean having a client which is highly stable and straightforward yet at the same time almost infinitely extendable to those with the right inclination, while slowly integrating good ideas from the community. I cannot possibly imagine a better way to allocate their development resources, it's a very Linux-ish approach.
preventing devs from selling their work, or requesting donations at all within the game
Devs can still make money off their addons. What they want to avoid is people coming to associate their in-game experience with ads and begging for money. As someone said above, great! Nobody needs to develop an AdBlock addon for WoW.
I'm growing very suspicious of the relationship between Blizzard and gold sellers, given how little they do to rein them in.
You know, I seem to recall a time when I got spammed with whispers from goldsellers, and had level 1 goldseller bots spam party invites at me, and that just doesn't seem to happen any more. Back then I didn't even have the handy "report spam" feature I do now, I have to settle for using it on the odd one just chattering away in/say. Pity Blizzard isn't doing anything about them.
Right, because Blizzard is gouging the hell out of us releasing a second paid expansion four years after release. They've added new quest hubs, battlegrounds, tradeskill stuff, whole zones, and of course many new dungeons and raids through free content patches.
I've been hassled about exactly two things going through airport security. One was a microcontroller, a large 40-pin IC that I had burnt out during prototyping and then drilled a hole through to make a nifty keychain. The lady at security was asking me what it was, and whether the pins came out (like you could threaten anyone with a sliver of metal that small). They didn't take it away or anything, though.
The other thing was an oversize tube of toothpaste.
For what it's worth, I (like many others) searched it while there were still only the two matches. Both were references to the same Myspace post. I don't think anything relating to the incident you mention would describe it as an 'accident.'
Google doesn't provide access, it only indexes (wow, that sounds familiar), so the common carrier argument is totally unrelated. In this case, it's more like a phone book refusing to list crack dealers in the yellow pages, and requesting that people report any crack dealer listings that happen to slip in somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
I was absentmindedly browsing the front page while doing something else on the other screen, and still had the summary for this Ask Slashdot in my mind when I started reading the comments for this story. Boy, did you ever look like an asshole for a second there!
Like all innovative things, the original has served its purpose, and been laid to rest. From the ashes, not one, but many successors rise. And inevitably, one will bear the name of its father - even if, like present-day Napster or Atari, it is at best a shambling husk of a brand compared to the original.
So if anything, the parents estimates are wildly optimistic
Yeah, you should definitely take those numbers with a grain of salt.
Odds are pretty good that a major pandemic will prove to be the solution. I'm convinced that the collective intelligence of the viral and bacterial comunnities exceeds that of our species.
Actually, if that happened, they'd have proved themselves equal, at best. Shortly after, the viral and bacterial communities would be having discussions on "peak human."
Not entirely true! I once had PSU make a horrible buzzing noise while all the magic blue smoke escaped... and then start up again just fine. I continued to use it for several months until one day it simply ceased to function, with naught but the faint smell of burning dielectrics to mark its passing.
Superhero origins are far more representative, actually. Consider: Spiderman and the Hulk both get their powers from radiation in the 60s, and from genetic engineering in their more recent movie versions.
If this becomes widespread, here's how it'll go: first, pirate groups will only have to pay for/obtain a couple extra copies, and come up with an automated reconstruction system that will compare the copies and perform error correction. Then the publishers will start obfuscating things more and more, and the pirate groups will develop more and more advanced algorithms. Eventually, the publishers will be publishing near-100% noise, with their heads too far up their asses to realize it, the only people buying copies will be the dedicated pirate groups, who will afford it by charging for their services, and before you know it, "content miners" will just be another step in the chain. The establishment is just last generation's rebels, am I right?
He means your home on the moon, i.e. the cave still offers more protection.
Really, ads for what? Windows? Office? Like, in case they haven't heard of it?
What MMO, at all, isn't a monotonous grindfest? WoW doesn't count, because it doesn't matter if I'm gathering gold or Mithril, I'm still grinding the shit.
Understand that when I say that, I mean "relative to Western MMOs." You can go grinding in WoW, yes, but you can also play without doing it, or at least without doing it to any excessive degree (unless you're one of those people who defines "grinding" as "performing any actions to advance your character", in which case why are you playing WoW?). Asian MMOs, though, really take it to another level.
If a game doesn't allow solo play, then the corollary is you need a group to do anything. Groups can be hard to assemble and coordinate - sometimes it takes a while to get going, and sometimes you just don't feel like dealing with it, even if you normally enjoy it. If you can't do anything useful ungrouped, then why bother logging in for anything other than a scheduled guild raid? And if you're logging in that infrequently, why keep logging in at all? This is the downward spiral of a strictly group-only MMO.
The distinguishing characteristics, as I understand it, are typically A) free to play, supported by micropayments for vanity stuff, and B) monotonous grindfests.
Why is this interesting? The guy isn't selling the data itself. You pay your fee, and he tells you "yes, your SSN and CC # are out on the internets." If you were targeting a particular person, this might be a useful first step in determining whether to try buying some bulk lists, but it (the service, not the list) probably has little black hat application beyond that.
So basically, it sounds like he's logging in to Halo on XBox Live and fragging people who are still chatting in the lobby.
Plus--- The collapse of the internet has been predicted many times. I think tales of the internet's demise are greatly exaggerated.
Didn't RTFA, but it sounds like they're not predicting the doom of the internet. More like forecasting some major growing pains in the near future.
...I think that a lot of people would rather pay a reasonable, and cheaper rate, for bandwidth they use than pay more for a theoretically uncapped amount that they won't use.
SUV sales say otherwise.
I don't think I'm the only one who typically finds Blizzard's jokes to be at least as exciting as their real news. Strip away just a little bit of the extra silliness and I would love to play a bard, or a two-headed ogre, or have a pimped-out mount.
I suspect there are more professional researchers who agree with you than you might think. There are some reasons why not many people are doing this, however. First and most importantly, it's fairly easy to show that we can't currently build a computer that can match the processing power of a human brain. We may be there in another decade or two, and we may be able to shave some time off of that by cutting corners and designing more efficient systems (but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting that nature's a lot better at that than we are). At any rate, assume we overcome that eventually. The human brain isn't just a blank slate. I'm too lazy to annotate a /. post with citations, but I know there's research out there that suggests that newborn children already have the ability to do tasks like facial recognition and filtering human voices out of background noise. Those are nontrivial tasks for a modern software system with training, and they do it without. In so many ways, the brain is still a black box with all kinds of pre-programmed abilities, and until that's fully deciphered you probably won't be able to train a blank slate statistical engine to act like one. Even if it did work eventually, it's fairly intuitive that it would develop more slowly than a human child, and who's going to commit to funding 10 years of such an uncertain project?
having a crappy client that is so lacking in so many respects that add-ons are at minimum an appreciable comfort
/say. Pity Blizzard isn't doing anything about them.
You mean having a client which is highly stable and straightforward yet at the same time almost infinitely extendable to those with the right inclination, while slowly integrating good ideas from the community. I cannot possibly imagine a better way to allocate their development resources, it's a very Linux-ish approach.
preventing devs from selling their work, or requesting donations at all within the game
Devs can still make money off their addons. What they want to avoid is people coming to associate their in-game experience with ads and begging for money. As someone said above, great! Nobody needs to develop an AdBlock addon for WoW.
I'm growing very suspicious of the relationship between Blizzard and gold sellers, given how little they do to rein them in.
You know, I seem to recall a time when I got spammed with whispers from goldsellers, and had level 1 goldseller bots spam party invites at me, and that just doesn't seem to happen any more. Back then I didn't even have the handy "report spam" feature I do now, I have to settle for using it on the odd one just chattering away in
Right, because Blizzard is gouging the hell out of us releasing a second paid expansion four years after release. They've added new quest hubs, battlegrounds, tradeskill stuff, whole zones, and of course many new dungeons and raids through free content patches.
Luck? Spotting and acting on opportunities is more of what you'd call a 'skill', and a valuable one at that.
I always thought the most powerful nerf gun in the world was the vintage nerf crossbow (properly tuned, of course). Example!
I've been hassled about exactly two things going through airport security. One was a microcontroller, a large 40-pin IC that I had burnt out during prototyping and then drilled a hole through to make a nifty keychain. The lady at security was asking me what it was, and whether the pins came out (like you could threaten anyone with a sliver of metal that small). They didn't take it away or anything, though.
The other thing was an oversize tube of toothpaste.
For what it's worth, I (like many others) searched it while there were still only the two matches. Both were references to the same Myspace post. I don't think anything relating to the incident you mention would describe it as an 'accident.'
Google doesn't provide access, it only indexes (wow, that sounds familiar), so the common carrier argument is totally unrelated. In this case, it's more like a phone book refusing to list crack dealers in the yellow pages, and requesting that people report any crack dealer listings that happen to slip in somehow.