That's scary, and you certainly shouldn't be playing these kinds of games if that's the effect they have on you.
But other people are not you.
While being a player of WoW, I have:
Gotten 1 of every class, on both Alliance and Horde side, to level 70 (most to 80, still dragging ass on getting my Warlocks and Warriors to level 80 - they're boring), seen the inside of every raid, and even gotten the Lore Master (did pretty much every quest in the game) achievement when it was a little harder.
I've also gotten 2 degrees, started work on a third, maintained a 4.0 gpa in grad school throughout that process, got a fantastic job at university, gotten promoted twice, been an author (and actually did the work) on over 20 papers, given god only knows how many job talks, been party to a dozen posters at events, dated a lot, found someone I like and we live together now, had a social life, and generally all of those accomplishments are VASTLY more good feeling to me.
I have a sense of proportion, I guess - I'm able to make the distinction between wow levels & gear and actually accomplishing things. People who can't do that - you're right - they shouldn't play games like WoW, because clearly they can't handle it.
Maybe hanging out with you is just less interesting/compelling than raiding.:D
Seriously, though, I think the people that get "hooked" on WoW would fuck up for other reasons. When I was in college I had friends who dropped out over a relationship gone bad, or drinking, or drugs, or depression, or socializing, or anything else you'd care to name. People dropping out of college is not a new thing - it's been going on since there have been colleges to drop out from.
My great uncle, who is 80, flunked out of college despite there not being WoW because of a girl.
As someone who has seen a number of nasty divorces go down, let me explain something to you:
Has 1 drink with dinner => massive alcoholic in divorce speak Spanked a child for running into the street => beats the children Hugs a child => probably molesting the children Has had lunch with co-worker of the opposite sex => has had a torrid affair Has had lunch with co-worker of the same sex => almost certainly having a homosexual affair
So...
Spent 3 hours over a weekend late at night raiding => neglects children, wasn't ever there for us, probably having an affair with someone online
I agree, people probably shouldn't be playing or logging in from work unless their workplace allows it during breaks, but the point is that anyone who has an agenda and an axe to grind and would use this tool to support it will certainly also be more than happy to spin things in the worst possible way. Divorce lawyers are fucking NASTY creatures, and people going through a hostile divorce can be psychotic.
When I played CO, I played it with an XBox controller and it was *quite* playable - I really never used more than 9 "active" (read: requiring a button press) powers, so left trigger and 3 buttons or right trigger and 3 buttons or no trigger and 3 buttons handled all my powers. One button would jump (if no trigger was used), interact with an NPC/object (if left trigger was used), accept (right trigger), or decline (both triggers). The D-Pad would cycle through targets (left) allies (right) follow my target (up) or assist my target (down). Left stick moved me or when pressed in turned my travel power on/off, right stick moved the camera, or when clicked zoomed my camera all the way in/out. That still leaves the top buttons.
It sounds like it'd be a mess, but actually it was pretty much as playable as any other console game, and quite easy to use after about 5 minutes of fussing and configuring.
I can't say the one I'd recommend is definitive by any means, but it was useful in that it presented statistics in a way that made the concept of "these are tools that can be used in a variety of ways, but you'll have to learn over time what methods work for your various projects" very obvious - it's basic (undergrad stats for behavioral sciences level) but it can be useful. The book is:
ISBN-13: 9780471509820 Lawrence Grimm, Statistical Applications for the Behavioral Sciences
To be honest, you'd probably be best served with a text book - I found that most of the ones used at varying levels when I returned to school for my psych degree were of the sort that taught like this: "Here is a statistical concept, here are some strong sides to it, here are some weaknesses. Here are 3 or 4 situations and some data about them - use this new concept to analyze those situations" and then the classes would largely be about what the results "showed" and whether or not those results were even remotely solid and reasonable and if so, why, if not, why not.
Many non-text stats books are written with an agenda - the authors want to promote their tool as the best one for any job - so they take the approach you decry. Text books that cover a variety of methods tend to be a lot less preachy and encourage you to recognize the strengths and limits of many methods.
Right now in my lab, we have one guy who is on an HLM (hierarchical linear modeleling) kick, and he just will not shut the fuck up about how wonderful it is. Any time we have event based data (as in, something happened to an individual several different times and we have some info about each event) he just goes CRAZY with this stuff. And it is useful... For some of his stuff... but he's trying to used it in situations that don't apply because it's just neat.
I don't think it's hard - I just think it requires a different way of thinking than most programmers usually take to maths.
As a programmer/developer who went into research (in social sciences, so it's really soft), I can say that in my experience stats is really closer to a programming language than it is to other maths. Here's why:
1) You have a LOT of tools to pick from. What kind of analysis do you want to do? What kind will give you the most useful result? What kind is your data amenable to?
2) You don't always have a clear choice as to which is the best for a given situation. Sometimes you need multiple different types of analysis to really get the full picture.
3) Just because it's math doesn't always mean it's right. There's some crazy ass black-box magic stats stuff we use for one project of ours that, in theory, will let us figure out the demographic composition of an unknown target population. Maybe. Sometimes. If the wind is right. Or not.
4) At the advanced levels, it's fucking insane. People who hack stuff like ultra optimized 3d engines with large quantities of assembler or whatever always wigged me out because my brain just doesn't work that way. With the really complex stats stuff it's the same way - I can plug and chug with the formulas, but I honestly have about as much comprehension of why some of the more advanced stuff works as my dog has of CPU design.
5) If you know the basics, you know just enough to be dangerous and really piss off people who know what they're doing. Being able to run an anova or determine correlation makes some people think they actually know what's going on because, hey, it's math. But a lot of people who just do the basic stuff think their results are more meaningful than they actually are - falling prey to the whole "it's statistically significant therefore it must be IMPORTANT" fallacy (when you can certainly have things that are "statistically significant" but actually have virtually no impact on the outcome.
6) Even when people know their shit, they disagree. A fine example of this would be the Space Shuttle failure rate - you had people saying that the shuttle would suffer a critical failure from everywhere between 1 in 5 and 1 in 50,000 launches. And depending on what tools they used to do their analysis, they were correct. Same as with programming languages - depending on the problem, equally skilled programmers might pick entirely different languages to use because they think one part or another is more critical.
Honestly, I really enjoy stats - if I had to do it all over again I would probably have spent a LOT more time working with stats than I did as a programmer in my younger years - but I won't pretend that it's totally clear what tools to use when. The author of TFA should do well to realize that even fellow statisticians would probably slap the shit out of him over some of his beliefs about how to properly go about utilizing stats toolsets.
You must have missed the part where I pointed out the free version that's being offered, eh, grandpa?
Don't let that get in the way of a good rant, though! Tell me about how you used to have to walk uphill both ways in the snow or about how you beat up Japs in the war!
Ah, yes, it makes sense, I see - I thought they were talking about sharing 1 account, not 2 - so the gem cutting character would be on a different account.
I suspect that a lot of the hacked accounts are caused by people sharing, though.
You misunderstand - I'm saying that it is possible (easy, in fact) to get your WoW information stolen without you, personally, being an idiot, not that many people who play WoW are not idiots. I do suspect that a large portion of the accounts that have been compromised belong to people who take less precautions giving that information out than they do with their credit cards - but that's not the only way it can happen.
I was objecting to your seeming "all or nothing" categorization of people as idiots or that people who are not idiots cannot get their accounts hacked.
As to the tape - you can get it with velcro, which will let you remove the thing to bring with you. Or get the version for your phone. It isn't like there's "all kinds of crap" taped to my monitor, either. Certainly if your desk is so messy you would be prone to misplace your fob, a thing taped to your monitor will not mess up the space even further!
1) It isn't a matter of idiocy on the end-user's part when you have major companies releasing extremely exploitable software and patches that introduce even more security flaws. I sure hope you don't run any software that you personally haven't looked at the source, compiled yourself, and know is 100% secure, because otherwise you're an idiot, by your own lights.
And, I have to say, does it make me an idiot that I'd rather spend 5 seconds each time I log in (maybe 10 seconds a day) using something like this, instead of spending 5 minutes (or hours, when patches are completely broken) every day keeping my computer secure? Hm... 10 seconds and I get extremely good (as in, it works to protect banking it'll damn sure be enough to protect my ability to slay Internet Dragons) security vs. 5 minutes (or more) and MAYBE my security is good, but maybe whoever distributed the patch screwed it up... Yeah, I guess only idiots would need or want to use this!
2) Is your time really worth so little that having to re-do something to get back to where you were if your account got hacked isn't a bother? Or maybe you just really like redoing stuff? I liked getting my characters to 80 and getting them geared up, too, but now that they are I'd really rather not have to redo it because someone slipped an ad with malware attached through to a site (slashdot) that I'm trying to support by not blocking ads...
3) Double sided tape. I have mine attached to my monitor because that's the only place I'd use it. I've lost my glasses when I was wearing them atop my head; I've not lost this thing yet because it's stuck to my monitor. I even didn't have a hard time reattaching it to the new monitor I just bought.
Lest anyone think you're insightful or interesting or informative (because your post indicates you are none of these things):
Blizzard is eating the cost of shipping on these inside the US and Europe. They are charging less than $7 for them, which, in addition to the shipping, has got to be pretty near break even. I sourced tokens a couple of years back and we were quoted $10-25 each depending on the supplier.
They are also offering a free version over the iPhone/iPod and for a variety of other devices like Blackberries.
The end result is about 4-5 seconds added to your time to log in, you don't get your account (that you've spent hundreds/thousands of hours on) stolen, and when you do have a legitimate issue in game that requires support there's a better chance someone will be able to help you sooner rather than 3 days from now.
Of course, I suspect based on your post that you don't actually play this game, and probably came in here just to be smug. Is "I won't pay MORE money to play a game I ALREADY paid for" the new "I don't own/watch tv"?
Many people playing these games have hundreds or thousands of hours spent playing - a $7 device and 5 seconds each time you log in is a pretty fair price for protecting that time spent.
Even if this were entirely a benefit to Blizzard and completely neutral for the player, it still actually would benefit players: less support staff time spent on "I got my account hacked!" means that players with other problems can get tickets answered more quickly.
His complaint doesn't even make sense - it isn't like cutting gems requires anything other than clicking a button, so if his friend has access to his account to do that, he'd have access to do that to, not needing his friend at all.
And even if it did require his friend to log in, IM would be more than sufficient for this purpose.
I think my issue was "they can bring men and materiel 4.3 LY, and are ruthless enough to kill anything that gets in their way, yet their weapons were rather low tech in comparison to their propulsion" - it felt kind of weird. You'd think "stop at nothing mercenary group" would ruthlessly exploit any tech they could for making war. Maybe it could be a miniaturization thing, but I guess I just felt that it was a bit lacking.
With the Na'vi, what made their tech seem consistent was that they very clearly had the attitude of "we CAN do this, but we don't do things just because we can, and we don't take it lightly even when we need to" - the humans had no such restrictions.
Except they made a point that they hadn't made much progress, and specifically that his figuring out any of the codes made them all look bad. Further, they had no power for any of the technology, so they couldn't read any of the computer stuff. It was *completely* implausible based on the scenario as presented in the movie.
Had they not made a point of the total cluelessness of the scientests who'd been working on the project, I'd agree with you. But they did make a point of it, so it wound up being much, much dumber than it could have been.
You don't even need to go so far afield as flight: in my pocket I have a magical device capable of letting me talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, as long as I know the proper incantation. It also lets me question unseen but vastly knowledgeable sources I don't fully comprehend when I need to know something. Who knew an iPhone was pure magic?
I don't think you are the only one. In fact, virtually eveyone I know who has seen it (including me), every thread discussing it, and every review I've read of it (not many, but you know what I'm saying) has called the story trite, but the visuals spectacular. You're hardly in the minority here.
I'm honestly baffled by the people who are bothered by the word unobtanium. It was obviously a joke, a nod towards engineers calling currently "impossible" materials "unobtanium" as a shorthand. If they'd called it something like Mithril or any other fictional material, would that somehow be better? If they just randomly spewed technobabble ala Trek, would that be better?
Though I know you're joking, it's actually not at all like the Independence Day stupidity of the Mac connecting to an alien computer.
In Avatar, the avatars were genetically engineered to be, essentially, Na'vi bodies, but to allow human beings to jack into them. This means that, at least as far as the bio network is concerned, they should be essentially the same as regular Na'vi. Getting into that network via those means would be easy - they don't need to understand the network because the genes know how to do that. Sigourney Weaver's team took years to develop the avatar bodies, and it was considered a work of genius. Advanced from our technology, for sure, but entirely reasonable.
In Independence Day, Jeff Goldblum used a Powerbook to hack an interface between two entirely different computing structures in the space of what, about 24 hours? Not only that, but to do it, it'd mean he'd have to reverse engineer their systems (requiring translating everything from an essentially unknown language that even people working on it for 30-40 years hadn't figured out among other things), and find weaknesses in their system. Even people who are incredibly skilled at hacking human systems generally need more than a few minutes and a text editor to completely compromise a system that was made by people. All of this puts the Independence Day stuff squarely in the realm of fantasy with some sci-fi elements.
Comparing the two is doing a disservice to a movie that, for all its flaws, wasn't the abortion of science and technology that most "sci-fi" films tend to be.
That was my thinking as well - the ultimate expression of "green" technology. Even though they seemed primitive by some standards, they did win the battle and managed to kick a supposedly vastly superior force off of their world. My guess is that if they explore this in the sequel it turns out the Na'vi forbears ran into similar issues as the humans (massive ecological problems) and so redesigned their world to bring it back from collapse.
I think you're being a bit short on your thinking. Where you saw some kind of magical ritual and spirit living on, I saw a high-speed universal neural interface that allowed a user to take control of local resources as necessary, and also was capable of downloading memories from an organic platform into something a little more permanent/distributed when that organic platform wasn't viable.
Just because the basis for their technology wasn't the same as ours is not a reason to dismiss it as fantasy - I don't think there was anything in that movie (except, perhaps, ironically, for the near light-speed travel the humans used) that wasn't feasible, or, even, on the near edge of coming to exist, through bio technology.
Right now we have people getting electrodes implanted into their brains that are allowing them to take control of various external devices (robotic limbs, keyboards, etc.) - why is it so hard for you to imagine something a bit more robust and universal, on the organic side? Right now we have researchers working on understanding how human memories and cognition work, and some basic ideas around how to read or store memories - why does it seem unreasonable to you that there might be a way to read out and store memories when an elder dies, so that they might continue to be available (in a limited way) for their people to continue to learn from? Right now we have a massive distributed network that spans the planet and contains pretty much everything that humans know - why does it seem unreasonable to you that an "intelligent" version of this might not be used by a sociaty to help guide them in difficult times, drawing on more information than any one individual could have?
Some pretty bright guy once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic... And if you don't think that was technology, or advanced, just ask yourself who won the war in the movie...
Ah, gotcha - sorry, I melded your post with something someone else said.
I think a basic level of security is helpful - metal detectors, xrays, whatever is basically passive security (sniffers, whatever). It's the crazy stuff that doesn't do any good, slows people down, and basically makes flight a chore that's pointless. To be honest, I'm more worried about someone who is mentally ill causing a problem on a flight than I am about terrorists - I could easily see some loon bring a gun on a plane and start something if there weren't any security.
Slashdot Mirror
That's scary, and you certainly shouldn't be playing these kinds of games if that's the effect they have on you.
But other people are not you.
While being a player of WoW, I have:
Gotten 1 of every class, on both Alliance and Horde side, to level 70 (most to 80, still dragging ass on getting my Warlocks and Warriors to level 80 - they're boring), seen the inside of every raid, and even gotten the Lore Master (did pretty much every quest in the game) achievement when it was a little harder.
I've also gotten 2 degrees, started work on a third, maintained a 4.0 gpa in grad school throughout that process, got a fantastic job at university, gotten promoted twice, been an author (and actually did the work) on over 20 papers, given god only knows how many job talks, been party to a dozen posters at events, dated a lot, found someone I like and we live together now, had a social life, and generally all of those accomplishments are VASTLY more good feeling to me.
I have a sense of proportion, I guess - I'm able to make the distinction between wow levels & gear and actually accomplishing things. People who can't do that - you're right - they shouldn't play games like WoW, because clearly they can't handle it.
Maybe hanging out with you is just less interesting/compelling than raiding. :D
Seriously, though, I think the people that get "hooked" on WoW would fuck up for other reasons. When I was in college I had friends who dropped out over a relationship gone bad, or drinking, or drugs, or depression, or socializing, or anything else you'd care to name. People dropping out of college is not a new thing - it's been going on since there have been colleges to drop out from.
My great uncle, who is 80, flunked out of college despite there not being WoW because of a girl.
As someone who has seen a number of nasty divorces go down, let me explain something to you:
Has 1 drink with dinner => massive alcoholic in divorce speak
Spanked a child for running into the street => beats the children
Hugs a child => probably molesting the children
Has had lunch with co-worker of the opposite sex => has had a torrid affair
Has had lunch with co-worker of the same sex => almost certainly having a homosexual affair
So...
Spent 3 hours over a weekend late at night raiding => neglects children, wasn't ever there for us, probably having an affair with someone online
I agree, people probably shouldn't be playing or logging in from work unless their workplace allows it during breaks, but the point is that anyone who has an agenda and an axe to grind and would use this tool to support it will certainly also be more than happy to spin things in the worst possible way. Divorce lawyers are fucking NASTY creatures, and people going through a hostile divorce can be psychotic.
When I played CO, I played it with an XBox controller and it was *quite* playable - I really never used more than 9 "active" (read: requiring a button press) powers, so left trigger and 3 buttons or right trigger and 3 buttons or no trigger and 3 buttons handled all my powers. One button would jump (if no trigger was used), interact with an NPC/object (if left trigger was used), accept (right trigger), or decline (both triggers). The D-Pad would cycle through targets (left) allies (right) follow my target (up) or assist my target (down). Left stick moved me or when pressed in turned my travel power on/off, right stick moved the camera, or when clicked zoomed my camera all the way in/out. That still leaves the top buttons.
It sounds like it'd be a mess, but actually it was pretty much as playable as any other console game, and quite easy to use after about 5 minutes of fussing and configuring.
I can't say the one I'd recommend is definitive by any means, but it was useful in that it presented statistics in a way that made the concept of "these are tools that can be used in a variety of ways, but you'll have to learn over time what methods work for your various projects" very obvious - it's basic (undergrad stats for behavioral sciences level) but it can be useful. The book is:
ISBN-13: 9780471509820
Lawrence Grimm, Statistical Applications for the Behavioral Sciences
To be honest, you'd probably be best served with a text book - I found that most of the ones used at varying levels when I returned to school for my psych degree were of the sort that taught like this: "Here is a statistical concept, here are some strong sides to it, here are some weaknesses. Here are 3 or 4 situations and some data about them - use this new concept to analyze those situations" and then the classes would largely be about what the results "showed" and whether or not those results were even remotely solid and reasonable and if so, why, if not, why not.
Many non-text stats books are written with an agenda - the authors want to promote their tool as the best one for any job - so they take the approach you decry. Text books that cover a variety of methods tend to be a lot less preachy and encourage you to recognize the strengths and limits of many methods.
Right now in my lab, we have one guy who is on an HLM (hierarchical linear modeleling) kick, and he just will not shut the fuck up about how wonderful it is. Any time we have event based data (as in, something happened to an individual several different times and we have some info about each event) he just goes CRAZY with this stuff. And it is useful... For some of his stuff... but he's trying to used it in situations that don't apply because it's just neat.
I don't think it's hard - I just think it requires a different way of thinking than most programmers usually take to maths.
As a programmer/developer who went into research (in social sciences, so it's really soft), I can say that in my experience stats is really closer to a programming language than it is to other maths. Here's why:
1) You have a LOT of tools to pick from. What kind of analysis do you want to do? What kind will give you the most useful result? What kind is your data amenable to?
2) You don't always have a clear choice as to which is the best for a given situation. Sometimes you need multiple different types of analysis to really get the full picture.
3) Just because it's math doesn't always mean it's right. There's some crazy ass black-box magic stats stuff we use for one project of ours that, in theory, will let us figure out the demographic composition of an unknown target population. Maybe. Sometimes. If the wind is right. Or not.
4) At the advanced levels, it's fucking insane. People who hack stuff like ultra optimized 3d engines with large quantities of assembler or whatever always wigged me out because my brain just doesn't work that way. With the really complex stats stuff it's the same way - I can plug and chug with the formulas, but I honestly have about as much comprehension of why some of the more advanced stuff works as my dog has of CPU design.
5) If you know the basics, you know just enough to be dangerous and really piss off people who know what they're doing. Being able to run an anova or determine correlation makes some people think they actually know what's going on because, hey, it's math. But a lot of people who just do the basic stuff think their results are more meaningful than they actually are - falling prey to the whole "it's statistically significant therefore it must be IMPORTANT" fallacy (when you can certainly have things that are "statistically significant" but actually have virtually no impact on the outcome.
6) Even when people know their shit, they disagree. A fine example of this would be the Space Shuttle failure rate - you had people saying that the shuttle would suffer a critical failure from everywhere between 1 in 5 and 1 in 50,000 launches. And depending on what tools they used to do their analysis, they were correct. Same as with programming languages - depending on the problem, equally skilled programmers might pick entirely different languages to use because they think one part or another is more critical.
Honestly, I really enjoy stats - if I had to do it all over again I would probably have spent a LOT more time working with stats than I did as a programmer in my younger years - but I won't pretend that it's totally clear what tools to use when. The author of TFA should do well to realize that even fellow statisticians would probably slap the shit out of him over some of his beliefs about how to properly go about utilizing stats toolsets.
You must have missed the part where I pointed out the free version that's being offered, eh, grandpa?
Don't let that get in the way of a good rant, though! Tell me about how you used to have to walk uphill both ways in the snow or about how you beat up Japs in the war!
Ah, yes, it makes sense, I see - I thought they were talking about sharing 1 account, not 2 - so the gem cutting character would be on a different account.
I suspect that a lot of the hacked accounts are caused by people sharing, though.
You misunderstand - I'm saying that it is possible (easy, in fact) to get your WoW information stolen without you, personally, being an idiot, not that many people who play WoW are not idiots. I do suspect that a large portion of the accounts that have been compromised belong to people who take less precautions giving that information out than they do with their credit cards - but that's not the only way it can happen.
I was objecting to your seeming "all or nothing" categorization of people as idiots or that people who are not idiots cannot get their accounts hacked.
As to the tape - you can get it with velcro, which will let you remove the thing to bring with you. Or get the version for your phone. It isn't like there's "all kinds of crap" taped to my monitor, either. Certainly if your desk is so messy you would be prone to misplace your fob, a thing taped to your monitor will not mess up the space even further!
1) It isn't a matter of idiocy on the end-user's part when you have major companies releasing extremely exploitable software and patches that introduce even more security flaws. I sure hope you don't run any software that you personally haven't looked at the source, compiled yourself, and know is 100% secure, because otherwise you're an idiot, by your own lights.
And, I have to say, does it make me an idiot that I'd rather spend 5 seconds each time I log in (maybe 10 seconds a day) using something like this, instead of spending 5 minutes (or hours, when patches are completely broken) every day keeping my computer secure? Hm... 10 seconds and I get extremely good (as in, it works to protect banking it'll damn sure be enough to protect my ability to slay Internet Dragons) security vs. 5 minutes (or more) and MAYBE my security is good, but maybe whoever distributed the patch screwed it up... Yeah, I guess only idiots would need or want to use this!
2) Is your time really worth so little that having to re-do something to get back to where you were if your account got hacked isn't a bother? Or maybe you just really like redoing stuff? I liked getting my characters to 80 and getting them geared up, too, but now that they are I'd really rather not have to redo it because someone slipped an ad with malware attached through to a site (slashdot) that I'm trying to support by not blocking ads...
3) Double sided tape. I have mine attached to my monitor because that's the only place I'd use it. I've lost my glasses when I was wearing them atop my head; I've not lost this thing yet because it's stuck to my monitor. I even didn't have a hard time reattaching it to the new monitor I just bought.
Lest anyone think you're insightful or interesting or informative (because your post indicates you are none of these things):
Blizzard is eating the cost of shipping on these inside the US and Europe. They are charging less than $7 for them, which, in addition to the shipping, has got to be pretty near break even. I sourced tokens a couple of years back and we were quoted $10-25 each depending on the supplier.
They are also offering a free version over the iPhone/iPod and for a variety of other devices like Blackberries.
The end result is about 4-5 seconds added to your time to log in, you don't get your account (that you've spent hundreds/thousands of hours on) stolen, and when you do have a legitimate issue in game that requires support there's a better chance someone will be able to help you sooner rather than 3 days from now.
Of course, I suspect based on your post that you don't actually play this game, and probably came in here just to be smug. Is "I won't pay MORE money to play a game I ALREADY paid for" the new "I don't own/watch tv"?
Is your time worth $0?
Many people playing these games have hundreds or thousands of hours spent playing - a $7 device and 5 seconds each time you log in is a pretty fair price for protecting that time spent.
Even if this were entirely a benefit to Blizzard and completely neutral for the player, it still actually would benefit players: less support staff time spent on "I got my account hacked!" means that players with other problems can get tickets answered more quickly.
His complaint doesn't even make sense - it isn't like cutting gems requires anything other than clicking a button, so if his friend has access to his account to do that, he'd have access to do that to, not needing his friend at all.
And even if it did require his friend to log in, IM would be more than sufficient for this purpose.
When I used to do consulting work a client said something similar - "You just clicked a few buttons - why should I pay this much for that?"
My response was direct and to the point: You aren't paying for me to click the buttons, you're paying because I know which ones to click.
I think my issue was "they can bring men and materiel 4.3 LY, and are ruthless enough to kill anything that gets in their way, yet their weapons were rather low tech in comparison to their propulsion" - it felt kind of weird. You'd think "stop at nothing mercenary group" would ruthlessly exploit any tech they could for making war. Maybe it could be a miniaturization thing, but I guess I just felt that it was a bit lacking.
With the Na'vi, what made their tech seem consistent was that they very clearly had the attitude of "we CAN do this, but we don't do things just because we can, and we don't take it lightly even when we need to" - the humans had no such restrictions.
Except they made a point that they hadn't made much progress, and specifically that his figuring out any of the codes made them all look bad. Further, they had no power for any of the technology, so they couldn't read any of the computer stuff. It was *completely* implausible based on the scenario as presented in the movie.
Had they not made a point of the total cluelessness of the scientests who'd been working on the project, I'd agree with you. But they did make a point of it, so it wound up being much, much dumber than it could have been.
You don't even need to go so far afield as flight: in my pocket I have a magical device capable of letting me talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, as long as I know the proper incantation. It also lets me question unseen but vastly knowledgeable sources I don't fully comprehend when I need to know something. Who knew an iPhone was pure magic?
I was in Bangkok on vacation and on one of the hotel channels they were running previews of upcoming movies.
Yep, that one was on the list. I just about died laughing.
I don't think you are the only one. In fact, virtually eveyone I know who has seen it (including me), every thread discussing it, and every review I've read of it (not many, but you know what I'm saying) has called the story trite, but the visuals spectacular. You're hardly in the minority here.
I'm honestly baffled by the people who are bothered by the word unobtanium. It was obviously a joke, a nod towards engineers calling currently "impossible" materials "unobtanium" as a shorthand. If they'd called it something like Mithril or any other fictional material, would that somehow be better? If they just randomly spewed technobabble ala Trek, would that be better?
Though I know you're joking, it's actually not at all like the Independence Day stupidity of the Mac connecting to an alien computer.
In Avatar, the avatars were genetically engineered to be, essentially, Na'vi bodies, but to allow human beings to jack into them. This means that, at least as far as the bio network is concerned, they should be essentially the same as regular Na'vi. Getting into that network via those means would be easy - they don't need to understand the network because the genes know how to do that. Sigourney Weaver's team took years to develop the avatar bodies, and it was considered a work of genius. Advanced from our technology, for sure, but entirely reasonable.
In Independence Day, Jeff Goldblum used a Powerbook to hack an interface between two entirely different computing structures in the space of what, about 24 hours? Not only that, but to do it, it'd mean he'd have to reverse engineer their systems (requiring translating everything from an essentially unknown language that even people working on it for 30-40 years hadn't figured out among other things), and find weaknesses in their system. Even people who are incredibly skilled at hacking human systems generally need more than a few minutes and a text editor to completely compromise a system that was made by people. All of this puts the Independence Day stuff squarely in the realm of fantasy with some sci-fi elements.
Comparing the two is doing a disservice to a movie that, for all its flaws, wasn't the abortion of science and technology that most "sci-fi" films tend to be.
That was my thinking as well - the ultimate expression of "green" technology. Even though they seemed primitive by some standards, they did win the battle and managed to kick a supposedly vastly superior force off of their world. My guess is that if they explore this in the sequel it turns out the Na'vi forbears ran into similar issues as the humans (massive ecological problems) and so redesigned their world to bring it back from collapse.
I think you're being a bit short on your thinking. Where you saw some kind of magical ritual and spirit living on, I saw a high-speed universal neural interface that allowed a user to take control of local resources as necessary, and also was capable of downloading memories from an organic platform into something a little more permanent/distributed when that organic platform wasn't viable.
Just because the basis for their technology wasn't the same as ours is not a reason to dismiss it as fantasy - I don't think there was anything in that movie (except, perhaps, ironically, for the near light-speed travel the humans used) that wasn't feasible, or, even, on the near edge of coming to exist, through bio technology.
Right now we have people getting electrodes implanted into their brains that are allowing them to take control of various external devices (robotic limbs, keyboards, etc.) - why is it so hard for you to imagine something a bit more robust and universal, on the organic side? Right now we have researchers working on understanding how human memories and cognition work, and some basic ideas around how to read or store memories - why does it seem unreasonable to you that there might be a way to read out and store memories when an elder dies, so that they might continue to be available (in a limited way) for their people to continue to learn from? Right now we have a massive distributed network that spans the planet and contains pretty much everything that humans know - why does it seem unreasonable to you that an "intelligent" version of this might not be used by a sociaty to help guide them in difficult times, drawing on more information than any one individual could have?
Some pretty bright guy once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic... And if you don't think that was technology, or advanced, just ask yourself who won the war in the movie...
Ah, gotcha - sorry, I melded your post with something someone else said.
I think a basic level of security is helpful - metal detectors, xrays, whatever is basically passive security (sniffers, whatever). It's the crazy stuff that doesn't do any good, slows people down, and basically makes flight a chore that's pointless. To be honest, I'm more worried about someone who is mentally ill causing a problem on a flight than I am about terrorists - I could easily see some loon bring a gun on a plane and start something if there weren't any security.