Twinking was never cheating, is the difference. The correct comparisons would be teleport hacks, which normally result in perma-bans.
Throwing all the twinks in the same BGs hasn't stopped it- it just forced them to organize so they can have their twink time. A twinked character is far more powerful than a regular one, but it is all within the confines of game stats- a cheating FPS player has any number of bizarre advantages that create essentially an entirely different game.
That being said, you still can't cheat in the cheater pool, or you get kicked out, so it is nothing like twinking in the twink pool (which was the whole point of the twink pool).
It is ludicrous to censor the word "nigger", as some areas are doing with Huck Finn, and it is cowardly to avoid any word at all. To what god are you bowing when you asterisk out the word? Are you saying that merely typing it will turn you into some fucking klansman? Do you think you are racist if you say it?
That's ludicrous. It's an important word with serious history. Calling someone a nigger and typing the word are two entirely different things. No one's gonna ask you if you want to be grand fucking wizard because you didn't ***** out a fucking word, and no one will assume you use it in conversation. There's things in history way worse than "nigger". You never asterisk out mass murderers and those who carry out genocide, or the word genocide itself, right?
I find it distressing that when I pointed out that a large and democratically significant fractions of South Koreans have a religious belief, and that it's not necessary or fair to finger point at a foreign entity, that this is exactly what you have done. Christianity has been in Asia for a lot longer than there's been gunpowder or white people in America.
Implying that only Americans or white people have agency, and blaming something you find negative about a culture on Americans, or whites, or however you phrase it an insulting and empty philosophy, and actually has a core of assumed racism so deep that you cannot even bear to look upon it.
But don't worry, numerically, you are in good company too:/
South Koreans have a good percent of highly religious per capita, so you don't need a top down conspiracy theory.
Hell, America is something like 40%ish creationists, far out numbering guided evolution and nonreligious evolution here- you don't need a conspiracy theory with a vote wins a plurality when a plurality believes it and has forever and probably will forever.
Dude, your DM must be an asshole. And also your DM must be in 1985.
Every 5th level fighter has a wide variety of feats to select from. A 1st level human fighter has THREE feats to pick- you could specialize in archery, melee, reach weapons, combat maneuvers, or take defensive feats or mounted feats.
You also have skill points to determine non-combat things, such as how perceptive you are, whether you are good at sailing and/or cooking, or pretty much anything else.
The term "magic-user" hasn't been used since 1st edition, and of course, every caster's actual spells that he has access to make a wide difference- on top of the feats, he has.
And in practice, you have widely different magic items.
Dicing for stats, while certainly supported, is but one of many ways to assign character stats. Unarguably the most popular version is a point buy, which lets you build a character much closer to the one you want.
Your terminology and assumptions are out of date, but even way back THEN, you could point buy, and had other things to distinguish characters, even though we didn't see feats to represent areas of specialization until 3.0.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
·
· Score: 1
Having played D3 a bit, I sort of see why they did it. I don't think it's actually about piracy- hell, they literally gave this game away to folks who have a year long subscription to WoW- it's because they want everything server side just like in WoW, which has given them tons of money. Now, with WoW, you'll grant that the game isn't even played locally, so calling it a copy protection scheme isn't fair. With D3, it sort of is- but I see why. All my RealID friends are around to chat with, no matter what game they are in, cheeves come rolling in, and the game feels like an MMO even though properly it really isn't.
I'm not really defending Blizzard on this, and I think that this decision was directly responsible for all the negative feelings on launch. Just that they honestly want the ONLY game experience to be the one that they think is "best", and that this is the online version. I don't agree with that overly-controlling idea by any means, but I'll grant that it probably isn't motivated by piracy concerns. It *might* be motivated by real money auction house- if you get some amazing weapon to drop, you might sell that on the RMAH, and that would generate income for Blizzard. But overall, I think they have "artistic" motivations for such an onerous level of control.
-> The constantly shifting definition of global warming. While it is entirely reasonable to expect that the accidental geoengineering events that humans are doing will have some effects (you can't just keep dumping carbon in without changing SOMETHING right?), the predictions are varied, and the results selectively chosen. To distinguish global warming from human created global warming (AGW) was a reasonable distinction, but now we are supposed to refer to "climate change", which encapsulates, of course, absolutely anything. Now the world can get cooler and an AGW proponent can point to that (presumably combined with some group of people, animals, or plants that are being screwed over), and say, climate change. It becomes much harder to falsify.
-> Both sides have a lot to lose politically. It's pretty clear that the deniers get short term gains if they are wrong but get their way. However, the pushers of it do to, down to the creation of entire markets to regulate the issue and profiteer. The net result is that THIS SHIT IS FUCKING OPAQUE. Both sides have been caught (via leaked emails) trying to cook the books to support Team Them. The "conspiracy" becomes believable when every element of all sciences can be interpreted to support AGW (or "climate change"), and the few scientists knowledgeable enough to actually interpret the summation of data correctly are all essentially owned by SOMEONE who has an agenda. This issue affects MOST science (and medicine) nowadays, but this particular corner has more of it than many others.
-> True believers fuck this all to hell. The denialists attack literally every aspect of climate science. You can find guys saying that the whole thing is a top-down conspiracy, you can find someone calling out individual scientists, and most everything in between. It's not obvious which, if any, of these critiques are legit, and which are lunatic ramblings. A lot of it is religious bullshit too, with some people saying things like "the Bible tells us the world won't end this way". Meanwhile, the AGW pushers often tell us to "conserve", and by that they mean "voluntarily suffer" or "surrender liberty". We see people opposing geoengineering (because that could solve the problem without the proper amount of atonement to Gaia, or something?), we see people making FUCKING MEANINGLESS choices solely to align themselves publicly with "their team" (owns a prius, lives a carbon-neutral lifestyle somehow, reuses their water), all the while saying that if everyone did this (or was forced to do it) we'd be better off (forgetting that things like the sea trade burn about an order of magnitude more fossil fuels that ALL the cars), etc. This is religious bullshit.
I think a lot of people miss the point here. The authors of the site call it "a joke", but that's only because the extent of the monitoring is small, and the ability to trace to a dynamic IP (which is most of us) is largely nonexistent. An organization with a bit more presence could grab MUCH more information, and/or find a way to sync with you in real time.
This site is really a warning about how much personal data is leaked- assuming you consider your IP personal- when you use torrenting. There are ways around this (discussed in this thread), but I really think the folks who check and say "well, it thinks I downloaded this video about making wine, but I never did, so the site is useless" are missing what the site implies is actually possible.
Very irresponsible, implying that a slower reaction time means a worse driver.
Plenty of older folks have very poor reaction times (and I'm not talking senile oldies), and almost all young folks have great reaction times. Clearly, a lot of practice and knowledge and judgment goes into driving.
Alcohol impairs much more than just reaction times. Alcohol can't be switched off.
Here's a story:
"The other day when driving home, I was drunk as all hell, but there was hardly any other traffic around. But when I hit I-225, the traffic was suddenly jam packed and hectic, so I suddenly cancelled my drunkenness instantly for the duration of that road."
Oh wait, that doesn't make any sense. But the actual version of that story, with a phone, fucking does. If I have to text (or talk) while driving, you can bet I'm in the right lane during that part with a great following distance and good future knowledge of what's going on. If shit is buzzing around me or there's some motorcycle doing some crazy shit, I'm not going to let myself get distracted. But if you get behind the wheel wasted, you've accepted limits on your peak and average levels of performance over the whole drive. It's a completely different pickle.
The first one I got had E giving it to F in the rear like a damned pro. F sure can take that central horizontal protuberance. There was a T watching it all, rocking back and forth. Pretty charged scene, all and all.
Gotta hit refresh. I'm hoping for some lowercase action next.
While I'm trivially opposed to legislation like this, I will point out that imagery doesn't really change what men want in a woman- that's coded deep or something- but it DOES change what WOMEN try to look like to compete with each other. Most men don't prefer the super skinny models. It's fashion designers who force that on us, and I think it's fair to point out that most men don't follow such fashion. I think everyone knows that a glamour model can be super hot, and a fashion model is... not. And of course, glamour models, while still often at a level of thinness that would be unachievable for all women, have genuinely feminine shapes to them, and are not some concentration camp throw-away.
Anyway, I don't dispute the findings of the researchers, merely the morality of attacking speech.
There's a running joke with World of Warcraft accounts, where a reasonably sophisticated group of mostly Chinese hackers constantly tries to log in as you. There's been phishing emails (please fill out this survey / you've won a free in-game whatever / your account is in danger of being disabled if you don't confirm you are you), there's phishing whispers in game (player to player direct communication), there's phishing shouts in trade chat (a channel visible to a very large percent of a server at any given time). They post bogus links on forums. Once you follow a link, it's all about exploiting your browser or just fooling you to typing stuff in. You can have an 'authenticator', one of those pseudo-random d00ders that gives you a number, so that stops you from being vulnerable to direct keylogging, unless there is an active agent waiting for that very moment (which has ALSO happened).
This is for WOW GOLD. Imagine what it will be like if it is for THE FATE OF NATIONS.
In addition to all the crap listed above, the amount of manipulation a logged in hacker has to do to gain anything out of your WoW account is actually substantial. It is not substantial to have a tiny thing listed that changes your vote from Bob to Alice, while still telling you that you voted for Bob. Whatever you add to work around this is also trivial to get around for your hacker. Do you send a confirmation email? He sends a fake one, after redirecting yours. Whatever you come up with, there's a a way around it, because YOUR CLIENT IS HACKED and THAT WILL HAPPEN. WoW players are at least reasonably nerdy, but in my guild I've seen a masters in EE get hacked (he trusted a binary, don't say you never have), and I've seen a very consistently clever man with get hacked (he doesn't know how exactly, but it's probably when he accessed from a hotel or something). Let me be brief: the dumbest American gets a damned vote, and it is HIS RIGHT that it get cast correctly, and he- or his army of other mouth breathers that access his machine, such as his also dumb wife and kids, will definitely click on whatever rabbit with the pancakes to ensure his machine is thoroughly 0wzzrd months ahead of time, and he'll think he voted for Bob, and he'll cast a vote for Alice, and then democracy breaks even more than it already is.
If they give you online voting, your vote is literally meaningless.
And this is before all the voter fraud that gets EASIER but happens already.
And this isn't the Demopublicans or the Republicrats ensuring their tool gets in office, this could be foreign interests taking over.
Online voting is the worst thing for Democracy, worse even than a dictator covered in blood with heads on spikes.
Quoting ArcherB:
> "I should also add that I will be conducting
> my own experiments in my basement with a neutrino cannon,
> flashlight and stop watch. If I see anything interesting,
> I'll post the results here."
Actually, if you get any results, please put them in the first post so everyone can see them.
Haters like myself. I don't get why GNOME had to go the direction it did, but it's clearly not for the users they have. It's like they are designing for some ludicrous platonic ideal? Or something?
Lemme just throw in with the "GNOME 3 sucks" crew. I hate it lots. It's like, what would come after GNOME 2? Well, apparently instead of adding stuff, they just substracted things, and made them suck, and then turned off all ability to customize without motherfucking recompiling it your fucking self. Such user hatred hasn't been seen in commercial software in a long time, and that hurts to say.
The problem ends up being that whatever you are paying NOW, you'll be paying in the FUTURE (adjusted upwards for "all of the things", of course)... and that is assuming you switch to this plan (which will eventually become ubiquitous without a fight). If you DON'T want the nannybot watching you, well, we have plenty of evidence that only terrorists, hackers, and speed demons don't want to be watched, so we'll raise your premium 800%....
And then they'll tell us on blogs and shit that it's a good thing that no one can afford to get out from under the thumb of the nannybot until they are established and in their 30s (40s... 50s... isn't it safer we have them mandatory now) by attacking a class of people "you" are scared of (teenagers, young folks, men in general).
It's completely dysphoric that companies are complaining about "used games" as an obstacle to their business model. Forgetting about all the totally correct and useful comparisons to cars, houses, boats, and clothes, how about we look at EXTREMELY SIMILAR PRODUCTS:
-Movies -Music
The guys who run these industries aren't famed for their social kindness, and we hear constantly about how music and movie piracy is supposedly crippling their industry- and yet THESE guys aren't complaining that used DVDs and CDs are destroying their business model, even though the complaint would be exactly as legitimate.
Even the Penny Arcade guys occasionally scold used gamers (indirectly), as if every person who plays a game should absolutely definitely have purchased a studio copy. This is a head scratchingly bizarre stance, and this is an issue in NO OTHER INDUSTRY IN THE WORLD. No other industry rails about the fact that they have made a product that maintains value- hell, "I can sell the game back later" is a feature that gamers know about WHEN THEY BUY GAMES, just like everyone else in every product in the whole world for ever and ever amen.
Next thing you know, we'll be hearing about how "disinterested customer base" is a real problem, and they need a law to force you to buy stuff...
All theoretical here, but if your firmware was encrypted with a block cypher (AES, for instance), all you need to do is clear out the key.
Unlike the silly crap used by a consumer console (which at some point or another has to actually possess the key when the power is off), this key could be input when the bot is booted, and cleared from RAM when there is problem- in a similar fashion to truecrypt.
Slashdot Mirror
This and better guns is why I 3 science.
Best news I've heard all year.
Twinking was never cheating, is the difference. The correct comparisons would be teleport hacks, which normally result in perma-bans.
Throwing all the twinks in the same BGs hasn't stopped it- it just forced them to organize so they can have their twink time. A twinked character is far more powerful than a regular one, but it is all within the confines of game stats- a cheating FPS player has any number of bizarre advantages that create essentially an entirely different game.
That being said, you still can't cheat in the cheater pool, or you get kicked out, so it is nothing like twinking in the twink pool (which was the whole point of the twink pool).
A majority != "almost exclusively"
It is ludicrous to censor the word "nigger", as some areas are doing with Huck Finn, and it is cowardly to avoid any word at all. To what god are you bowing when you asterisk out the word? Are you saying that merely typing it will turn you into some fucking klansman? Do you think you are racist if you say it?
That's ludicrous. It's an important word with serious history. Calling someone a nigger and typing the word are two entirely different things. No one's gonna ask you if you want to be grand fucking wizard because you didn't ***** out a fucking word, and no one will assume you use it in conversation. There's things in history way worse than "nigger". You never asterisk out mass murderers and those who carry out genocide, or the word genocide itself, right?
Stop playing games and speak.
There's a lot of reasons why South Korea has Christians, I'm sure missionaries are part of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Korea
I find it distressing that when I pointed out that a large and democratically significant fractions of South Koreans have a religious belief, and that it's not necessary or fair to finger point at a foreign entity, that this is exactly what you have done. Christianity has been in Asia for a lot longer than there's been gunpowder or white people in America.
Implying that only Americans or white people have agency, and blaming something you find negative about a culture on Americans, or whites, or however you phrase it an insulting and empty philosophy, and actually has a core of assumed racism so deep that you cannot even bear to look upon it.
But don't worry, numerically, you are in good company too :/
South Koreans have a good percent of highly religious per capita, so you don't need a top down conspiracy theory.
Hell, America is something like 40%ish creationists, far out numbering guided evolution and nonreligious evolution here- you don't need a conspiracy theory with a vote wins a plurality when a plurality believes it and has forever and probably will forever.
Dude, your DM must be an asshole. And also your DM must be in 1985.
Every 5th level fighter has a wide variety of feats to select from. A 1st level human fighter has THREE feats to pick- you could specialize in archery, melee, reach weapons, combat maneuvers, or take defensive feats or mounted feats.
You also have skill points to determine non-combat things, such as how perceptive you are, whether you are good at sailing and/or cooking, or pretty much anything else.
The term "magic-user" hasn't been used since 1st edition, and of course, every caster's actual spells that he has access to make a wide difference- on top of the feats, he has.
And in practice, you have widely different magic items.
Dicing for stats, while certainly supported, is but one of many ways to assign character stats. Unarguably the most popular version is a point buy, which lets you build a character much closer to the one you want.
Your terminology and assumptions are out of date, but even way back THEN, you could point buy, and had other things to distinguish characters, even though we didn't see feats to represent areas of specialization until 3.0.
Having played D3 a bit, I sort of see why they did it. I don't think it's actually about piracy- hell, they literally gave this game away to folks who have a year long subscription to WoW- it's because they want everything server side just like in WoW, which has given them tons of money. Now, with WoW, you'll grant that the game isn't even played locally, so calling it a copy protection scheme isn't fair. With D3, it sort of is- but I see why. All my RealID friends are around to chat with, no matter what game they are in, cheeves come rolling in, and the game feels like an MMO even though properly it really isn't.
I'm not really defending Blizzard on this, and I think that this decision was directly responsible for all the negative feelings on launch. Just that they honestly want the ONLY game experience to be the one that they think is "best", and that this is the online version. I don't agree with that overly-controlling idea by any means, but I'll grant that it probably isn't motivated by piracy concerns. It *might* be motivated by real money auction house- if you get some amazing weapon to drop, you might sell that on the RMAH, and that would generate income for Blizzard. But overall, I think they have "artistic" motivations for such an onerous level of control.
My concerns are as follows:
-> The constantly shifting definition of global warming.
While it is entirely reasonable to expect that the accidental geoengineering events that humans are doing will have some effects (you can't just keep dumping carbon in without changing SOMETHING right?), the predictions are varied, and the results selectively chosen. To distinguish global warming from human created global warming (AGW) was a reasonable distinction, but now we are supposed to refer to "climate change", which encapsulates, of course, absolutely anything. Now the world can get cooler and an AGW proponent can point to that (presumably combined with some group of people, animals, or plants that are being screwed over), and say, climate change. It becomes much harder to falsify.
-> Both sides have a lot to lose politically.
It's pretty clear that the deniers get short term gains if they are wrong but get their way. However, the pushers of it do to, down to the creation of entire markets to regulate the issue and profiteer. The net result is that THIS SHIT IS FUCKING OPAQUE. Both sides have been caught (via leaked emails) trying to cook the books to support Team Them. The "conspiracy" becomes believable when every element of all sciences can be interpreted to support AGW (or "climate change"), and the few scientists knowledgeable enough to actually interpret the summation of data correctly are all essentially owned by SOMEONE who has an agenda. This issue affects MOST science (and medicine) nowadays, but this particular corner has more of it than many others.
-> True believers fuck this all to hell.
The denialists attack literally every aspect of climate science. You can find guys saying that the whole thing is a top-down conspiracy, you can find someone calling out individual scientists, and most everything in between. It's not obvious which, if any, of these critiques are legit, and which are lunatic ramblings. A lot of it is religious bullshit too, with some people saying things like "the Bible tells us the world won't end this way".
Meanwhile, the AGW pushers often tell us to "conserve", and by that they mean "voluntarily suffer" or "surrender liberty". We see people opposing geoengineering (because that could solve the problem without the proper amount of atonement to Gaia, or something?), we see people making FUCKING MEANINGLESS choices solely to align themselves publicly with "their team" (owns a prius, lives a carbon-neutral lifestyle somehow, reuses their water), all the while saying that if everyone did this (or was forced to do it) we'd be better off (forgetting that things like the sea trade burn about an order of magnitude more fossil fuels that ALL the cars), etc. This is religious bullshit.
I hate this topic, and you should too!
It is known.
I think a lot of people miss the point here. The authors of the site call it "a joke", but that's only because the extent of the monitoring is small, and the ability to trace to a dynamic IP (which is most of us) is largely nonexistent. An organization with a bit more presence could grab MUCH more information, and/or find a way to sync with you in real time.
This site is really a warning about how much personal data is leaked- assuming you consider your IP personal- when you use torrenting. There are ways around this (discussed in this thread), but I really think the folks who check and say "well, it thinks I downloaded this video about making wine, but I never did, so the site is useless" are missing what the site implies is actually possible.
Beyond sexism, this is open misandry.
Course I do!
I suppose I could "choose" not to drive at all as well, for cleverly chosen values of "choose".
Very irresponsible, implying that a slower reaction time means a worse driver.
Plenty of older folks have very poor reaction times (and I'm not talking senile oldies), and almost all young folks have great reaction times. Clearly, a lot of practice and knowledge and judgment goes into driving.
Alcohol impairs much more than just reaction times. Alcohol can't be switched off.
Here's a story:
"The other day when driving home, I was drunk as all hell, but there was hardly any other traffic around. But when I hit I-225, the traffic was suddenly jam packed and hectic, so I suddenly cancelled my drunkenness instantly for the duration of that road."
Oh wait, that doesn't make any sense. But the actual version of that story, with a phone, fucking does. If I have to text (or talk) while driving, you can bet I'm in the right lane during that part with a great following distance and good future knowledge of what's going on. If shit is buzzing around me or there's some motorcycle doing some crazy shit, I'm not going to let myself get distracted. But if you get behind the wheel wasted, you've accepted limits on your peak and average levels of performance over the whole drive. It's a completely different pickle.
The first one I got had E giving it to F in the rear like a damned pro. F sure can take that central horizontal protuberance. There was a T watching it all, rocking back and forth. Pretty charged scene, all and all.
Gotta hit refresh. I'm hoping for some lowercase action next.
While I'm trivially opposed to legislation like this, I will point out that imagery doesn't really change what men want in a woman- that's coded deep or something- but it DOES change what WOMEN try to look like to compete with each other. Most men don't prefer the super skinny models. It's fashion designers who force that on us, and I think it's fair to point out that most men don't follow such fashion. I think everyone knows that a glamour model can be super hot, and a fashion model is... not. And of course, glamour models, while still often at a level of thinness that would be unachievable for all women, have genuinely feminine shapes to them, and are not some concentration camp throw-away.
Anyway, I don't dispute the findings of the researchers, merely the morality of attacking speech.
There's a running joke with World of Warcraft accounts, where a reasonably sophisticated group of mostly Chinese hackers constantly tries to log in as you. There's been phishing emails (please fill out this survey / you've won a free in-game whatever / your account is in danger of being disabled if you don't confirm you are you), there's phishing whispers in game (player to player direct communication), there's phishing shouts in trade chat (a channel visible to a very large percent of a server at any given time). They post bogus links on forums. Once you follow a link, it's all about exploiting your browser or just fooling you to typing stuff in. You can have an 'authenticator', one of those pseudo-random d00ders that gives you a number, so that stops you from being vulnerable to direct keylogging, unless there is an active agent waiting for that very moment (which has ALSO happened).
This is for WOW GOLD. Imagine what it will be like if it is for THE FATE OF NATIONS.
In addition to all the crap listed above, the amount of manipulation a logged in hacker has to do to gain anything out of your WoW account is actually substantial. It is not substantial to have a tiny thing listed that changes your vote from Bob to Alice, while still telling you that you voted for Bob. Whatever you add to work around this is also trivial to get around for your hacker. Do you send a confirmation email? He sends a fake one, after redirecting yours. Whatever you come up with, there's a a way around it, because YOUR CLIENT IS HACKED and THAT WILL HAPPEN. WoW players are at least reasonably nerdy, but in my guild I've seen a masters in EE get hacked (he trusted a binary, don't say you never have), and I've seen a very consistently clever man with get hacked (he doesn't know how exactly, but it's probably when he accessed from a hotel or something). Let me be brief: the dumbest American gets a damned vote, and it is HIS RIGHT that it get cast correctly, and he- or his army of other mouth breathers that access his machine, such as his also dumb wife and kids, will definitely click on whatever rabbit with the pancakes to ensure his machine is thoroughly 0wzzrd months ahead of time, and he'll think he voted for Bob, and he'll cast a vote for Alice, and then democracy breaks even more than it already is.
If they give you online voting, your vote is literally meaningless.
And this is before all the voter fraud that gets EASIER but happens already.
And this isn't the Demopublicans or the Republicrats ensuring their tool gets in office, this could be foreign interests taking over.
Online voting is the worst thing for Democracy, worse even than a dictator covered in blood with heads on spikes.
Quoting ArcherB:
> "I should also add that I will be conducting
> my own experiments in my basement with a neutrino cannon,
> flashlight and stop watch. If I see anything interesting,
> I'll post the results here."
Actually, if you get any results, please put them in the first post so everyone can see them.
Haters like myself. I don't get why GNOME had to go the direction it did, but it's clearly not for the users they have. It's like they are designing for some ludicrous platonic ideal? Or something?
Lemme just throw in with the "GNOME 3 sucks" crew. I hate it lots. It's like, what would come after GNOME 2? Well, apparently instead of adding stuff, they just substracted things, and made them suck, and then turned off all ability to customize without motherfucking recompiling it your fucking self. Such user hatred hasn't been seen in commercial software in a long time, and that hurts to say.
The problem ends up being that whatever you are paying NOW, you'll be paying in the FUTURE (adjusted upwards for "all of the things", of course)... and that is assuming you switch to this plan (which will eventually become ubiquitous without a fight). If you DON'T want the nannybot watching you, well, we have plenty of evidence that only terrorists, hackers, and speed demons don't want to be watched, so we'll raise your premium 800%....
And then they'll tell us on blogs and shit that it's a good thing that no one can afford to get out from under the thumb of the nannybot until they are established and in their 30s (40s... 50s... isn't it safer we have them mandatory now) by attacking a class of people "you" are scared of (teenagers, young folks, men in general).
Oppose this now.
It's completely dysphoric that companies are complaining about "used games" as an obstacle to their business model. Forgetting about all the totally correct and useful comparisons to cars, houses, boats, and clothes, how about we look at EXTREMELY SIMILAR PRODUCTS:
-Movies
-Music
The guys who run these industries aren't famed for their social kindness, and we hear constantly about how music and movie piracy is supposedly crippling their industry- and yet THESE guys aren't complaining that used DVDs and CDs are destroying their business model, even though the complaint would be exactly as legitimate.
Even the Penny Arcade guys occasionally scold used gamers (indirectly), as if every person who plays a game should absolutely definitely have purchased a studio copy. This is a head scratchingly bizarre stance, and this is an issue in NO OTHER INDUSTRY IN THE WORLD. No other industry rails about the fact that they have made a product that maintains value- hell, "I can sell the game back later" is a feature that gamers know about WHEN THEY BUY GAMES, just like everyone else in every product in the whole world for ever and ever amen.
Next thing you know, we'll be hearing about how "disinterested customer base" is a real problem, and they need a law to force you to buy stuff...
Testosterone also encourages fairness:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2009/12/08/tech-biology-testosterone-behaviour.html
Doubling the supply has an effect on price? Shocking.
All theoretical here, but if your firmware was encrypted with a block cypher (AES, for instance), all you need to do is clear out the key.
Unlike the silly crap used by a consumer console (which at some point or another has to actually possess the key when the power is off), this key could be input when the bot is booted, and cleared from RAM when there is problem- in a similar fashion to truecrypt.
Heh, the amendment that worked by banning whole classes of existing laws?