My guess is that this is a problem with an automated system trying to deal with roughly 800 million videos generating so many false positives that the cost of having a human look at every disputed video is cost prohibitive. Until Rumblefish sees a consequence, I doubt they're going to change their process. It's offensive to me that they don't treat other people's copyrighted works as well as they would like their client's work to be treated, but they probably see inserting ads as harmless.
I did send both Rumblefish and YouTube an e-mail expressing my disappointment. YouTube is now removed from my ad blocker exclusion list.
I started poking around Vimeo and was impressed. No Tosh.0 material, but quite a bit of interesting viewing. Of course the amount of content can't compare with YouTube, so I'm probably still stuck with it when I'm looking for something specific, but when you're looking for something randomly interesting it's worth a visit.
My employer has an electronic communications policy that forbids employee's from participating in the company's social networking sites unless it is their job to do so. We can't "like" their posts, or respond to tweets etc. I work in the financial industry, and the company is very protective of their credibility. We do have an internal social networking site to promote collaboration.
I think any company that tries to "stuff the ballot box" by making employees sign up for accounts is barking up the wrong tree. They'll have an active looking social networking presence, but it won't yield the benefits that having a real community of clients will.
I was reading Delete by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger recently and he has a very simple solution... put expiration dates on all data. I don't know that it's a basic human right to be forgotten, but it's pretty harsh to have a picture of one act of foolishness follow you around for 20 years.
So at what point do the actor's/actress' talents become obsolete?
Actors are still artists - a good actor can bring a lot to a performance even if they're just voice acting or mo-capped. Golum had a live actor bringing him to life, as did Sonny in I, Robot. The CGI folks drew heavily on the actor's portrayals. A lot of directors see their relationship with their actors as a collaboration and some tend to choose the same folks over and over because they work well together. From what I've seen in the special features sections of some animated movies, the voice actors are filmed while they're reading and some of that performance gets incorporated into the film. So I think there will be less room for mediocre actors, and the "extra" may become obsolete, but I think there will always be room for the person with a talent for acting or performance.
The bright side that I can see is that perhaps not having to put up with so many dumb, uneducated actors as public role models and political activists.
Well professors should lecture and artists should speak through their art. It's really annoying to get lectured when you're expecting art. People should stand for what they believe in because it's the right thing to do, not because all of the cool kids are doing it or because it helps their image.
I think this vehement support of bots is pretty strange. What's the matter? Did the cost of having to re-purchase keys and replenish your stock because you've been banned cut into your farming profits? If the game bores you, don't play it. I don't play WoW, or EQ 2, or any subscription based game right now, although I've played most of them at on one time or the other until I wasn't getting my $15 worth of enjoyment out of them. Item and gold farming does ruin the game because it fucks up the economy. If nothing is done about it, then you end up with the folks that don't buy gold or bot unable "earn" any of the rewards.
In EQ2 my crafter was unable to harvest the rares needed for some weapons she wanted to make because there were 3 farmers working in tandem cherry picking the nodes that I needed - and they were there every time I had the opportunity to play and went to check. So, after realizing it was more frustrating than fun, I quit and found a different game. This argument that "if a game can be ruined simply by (fill in some anti-social behavior), it's a bad game to start with" is completely fatuous. MMOs are as much about the community as the game mechanic. If a company allows the botters and farmers to chase out the folks that are there to play (cooperatively or competitively), they'll lose money. Blizzard has already lost my money because I didn't buy the expansion and it had nothing to do with game mechanic and everything to do with community. Am I even a blip on Blizzard's WoW radar? Most certainly not, but based on how aggressively they are banning accounts I'd venture a guess that there are other folks out there that feel the same way that I do.
The only articles I've been able to find about this aren't exactly objective and haven't provided the actual text of the claims being made by Vivendi. While it's easy to hate the big conglomerate, I've had a number of games ruined for me because of bots/farmers (indirectly and directly) and tend to support action being taken to squash gold and item farming. I'm not sure that I would support action against the third party software providers (since they haven't agreed to the TOS) and I'm interested to see the exact nature of the claims Vivendi is making, uncolored by the bias of supporters of the folks being sued.
I did like the quests in the trial I tried out - the objectives actually felt like different tasks unlike the repetitive quests in the other MMOs like WoW and EQ. I just couldn't get past the complexity of the character development system. I get very attached to my little avatars and I hate feeling like I have to completely plan out my character before I start instead of letting them grow up as the game progresses. There were just too many choices and the differences among the choices weren't large enough to develop my character on the fly. I don't mind having to educate myself a little bit, but I would like to have the option to ignore some of the nuances in the beginning without feeling like I might be completely ruining my character.
Maybe my tinfoil hat is showing, but the first thing that sprang to my mind was "Great, now they have a way to track cash transactions". RFID chips in the currency, readers in the cash registers so you don't have to worry all that much about distance. They'll sell it as a way to prevent counterfeiting.
I had the same sort of thought. It's really frightening to think about making global climate changes when we don't understand enough about weather to accurately predict where a hurricane is going to make landfall far enough in advance to evacuate. I'm fairly sure that the world isn't going to end by humans blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons. I think it's far more likely that we're going to "fix" ourselves to death. The only thing that lets me sleep at night is the fact that we're unlikely to actually ever put together something that works on a global scale because any project where that much money is involved is going to fall victim to corruption, graft, and general power mongering.
Take the eruption of St. Helen - over 20 years later scientists are still learning about ecosystems and how they survive and recover from devastating disturbances. The ecosystem didn't respond at all the way scientists thought it might and they discovered natural mechanisms that they hadn't imagined could exist. Hell it wasn't that long ago that we thought putting out forest fires was a universally good thing. Regardless of whether or not man is responsible for global warming, we still don't understand the implications of trying to reverse it. We really don't know that the seas are going to rise, or that anything catastrophic is actually going to come to pass if global warming isn't stopped. The ecosystem is responding to a change to keep things functional (in the planetary sense), so maybe we shouldn't be going off half cocked trying to prevent the adjustment by introducing another change rather than gradually reversing the change we think is causing it (Hurry up and start increasing the pirate population people!). Maybe we should save our money for when the magnetic poles flip - that's probably going to be far more catastrophic from a human perspective. Everyone seems very concerned about the temperature rising, but not a lot of folks seem worried that our magnetic field is weakening which is potentially much worse.
I tell you what, why don't you climate scientists go learn how to "fix" droughts, ice storms, hurricanes, and other localized weather disasters that cause so much human suffering in the here and now and then we'll talk about letting you play with the entire planet for a disaster that may or may not happen sometime in the next 100 to 10000 years.
But I would like to point out that some of the problems you faced (like integration with MS Exchange server) are simply Microsoft not wanting to release/support/adapt to standards. Granted I have my share of frustration with how Microsoft does business, but why would you expect Microsoft to enable a competitor? Microsoft built a business that enabled it to define what APIs hardware manufacturers and software developers would have to code to if they wanted to reach a huge portion of the market. Why should Linux get what amounts to charity? Why not come up with a better solution than Exchange instead of begging for it to be opened? I work for a very small software company and we compete very effectively with major players. One of the ways we do that is by supporting Linux, which the big guys don't. I think there is a ton of money to be made with a little bit of investment. Governments and businesses are starting to get concerned that they're getting completely dependent on an operating system they don't have control over. Some home users are getting frustrated with enforced DRM and incomprehensible, draconian EULAs. Some of us want to be able to use an old out dated piece of software that we like instead of being forced to upgrade (I want my software to be a product damn it, not a service).
Capitalism works. The opportunity is there but whats holding Linux back (as I see it) is that Linux can't decide on standards among its various and diverse distros. Linux needs simulcrums for "Program Files" and the registry and the start menu. Choice is great, but software companies aren't going to take on maintaining software for 50 different platforms to reach 5% of the market. You aren't going to have enterprise level software on Linux until the tools are there for the enterprise level software developers. Linux is the smallest part of our sales and takes a disproportionate chunk of our maintenance resources. Until you give developers the tools to provide a professional consistent product across all of the major Linux flavors, Linux is going to remain a niche. Look at what all of the Windows flavors and Mac OSes have in common as features of the operating system, then subtract out what Linux doesn't do in all of its distros. That's what has to happen before Linux is going to be taken seriously by enterprise.
Where I surf and what pages I look at and various other tidbits about my personal preferences and habits are valuable commodities. Companies wouldn't be pursuing that information so aggressively if it didn't have any value. So if a hotel wants to offer me free internet service in exchange for letting them see where I go and serve ads to me, sure I might consider it. To take that information without informing me and offering some sort of consideration is just shady if not outright thievery. Charging me for the privilege of helping fill their coffers is insult added to injury. It's crap like this that makes me seriously consider going to law school. I'd love to try a case like this based on the idea that it's stealing and not privacy invasion.
I thought it was a stretch to say these employees were involved in an "abusive" relationship with their boss. Lots of folks, employees and supervisors included, are poor communicators and tend to shift blame for their unhappiness on to other people. What I got out of this article was that about 20% of people in the work force have some degree of unhappiness with their employment due to poor people/communication skills and don't know how to fix it. 9 out of 10 issues I've had with my bosses were communication problems and were easily sorted out if both of us were willing to act like professionals. Most of the worst situations, in my experience, were caused by folks who thought you had to be friends to work together (and therefore took everything way too personally) or folks that were afraid of confrontation and wouldn't speak up when they felt they were being wronged. If you don't confront someone you think is giving you the "silent treatment" how do you know that's what they're doing? Maybe they just don't have anything to say to you, or they're going deaf and are too embarrassed to get a hearing aid, or their dog died last night and they're depressed. Supervisors who are out to get someone from pure spite are very rare in my experience. If you keep running into abusive bosses in all the jobs you take, maybe the problem isn't your boss...
Nope, I read it as "A bar in NY" I'm glad you said something, because one is the loneliest number... Maybe the headline should read The New York Bar. Those little words we like to leave out on Internet (i.e. articles) might actually have some use after all...
I just thought folks might be interested to see what they were actually doing inside the message to try to track the e-mail. I was curious about how ReadNotify was going to pull off some of the claims that they make on their website. ReadNotify didn't track the e-mail I sent to myself because I use a client configured so it doesn't access anything over the network other than the mail server. All ReadNotify knew was that it had been delivered.
For those of y'all that are interested, I just signed up for their trial account and sent myself a message. Here are the interesting parts (truncated headers):
Honestly, I don't think it has anything to do with gerrymandering. I think the Hitchhiker's Guide summed it up nicely:
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
We're stuck picking from the people who want the job, who are very unlikely to be the type of people that we want doing the job, regardless of their party affiliation. I wonder if we wouldn't be better off if Congress were run more like jury duty... your name gets pseudo-randomly selected, and off you go to do your civic duty.
I use a special junk account when applying for membership to different sites.
For sites that need a "real" e-mail address to get in touch with me, I use http://sneakemail.com/ Everyone gets a unique address, so when the spam hits, I know where the spammer found the address. If someone starts abusing the privilege of being able to communicate with me electronically, I shut off the e-mail address, as one of my credit card companies discovered recently. All in all a very useful service for those of us that are too busy to set it up for ourselves.
Looking forward to a new setting
on
Africa, The MMOG
·
· Score: 1
I'm completely burnt on the standard elves and orcs MMO, but unfortunately of all the MMO's I've tried, these seem to have the best game play mechanics for how I like to play. I'd love to see a new MMO that has some depth to it with a different cultural setting. I don't particularly care if it's a romanticized view, so long as it's fun and different.
Since the game is set in 13th century Africa, I'm assuming "learn something about Africa" means "get the flavor of African mythology". The knight/castle/dragon games and stories aren't an accurate portrayal of medieval times, why should something based on African mythology be held to a different standard? Sure most of present day Africa is a political, economic, and sociological disaster zone. I'm not sure that has anything to do with the mythology of the different African cultures being an interesting setting for a game. I do think it's kind of a big chunk to bite off simply because of the diversity. The geography could make for some beautiful and varied locales to play in though.
Interesting point that alternative energy sources are only regionally effective. Maybe we should be focusing on the storage and transport of energy instead of collection. Then we just toss a few solar collection satellites in orbit where the weather can't affect their efficiency, and send it down in some manner more efficient than photons through an atmosphere.
In order to make an educated choice, the copy protection scheme needs to be on the box right along with the system requirements. I don't expect the box to tell me all the details of the scheme, just tell me which one it is, and I'll figure out for myself whether I want it on my system or not. I know for a fact that programs protected with Safedisc 2 won't run on one of my systems without extensive hoop-jumping and hair-pulling, so I consider "Safedisc compatible" a system requirement. I'd also like to know if a program is going to refuse to run unless I uninstall legitimate software from other companies, as was the case of Sims 2 vs CloneCD. Guess which program won... If "Incompatible with all popular CD/DVD burning software" was on the box I never would have wasted my money on it.
Shouldn't software companies be required to fully disclose all of the system requirements? Especially when just opening the box makes it extremely difficult to return the product and get your money back.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that this is a problem with an automated system trying to deal with roughly 800 million videos generating so many false positives that the cost of having a human look at every disputed video is cost prohibitive. Until Rumblefish sees a consequence, I doubt they're going to change their process. It's offensive to me that they don't treat other people's copyrighted works as well as they would like their client's work to be treated, but they probably see inserting ads as harmless.
I did send both Rumblefish and YouTube an e-mail expressing my disappointment. YouTube is now removed from my ad blocker exclusion list.
There are alternatives to YouTube : http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/02/20/5-video-sharing-alternatives-to-youtube/. YouTube/Google may see their advertisers as their customers, but you have to have a worthwhile demographic looking at the ads to make them worth anything.
I started poking around Vimeo and was impressed. No Tosh.0 material, but quite a bit of interesting viewing. Of course the amount of content can't compare with YouTube, so I'm probably still stuck with it when I'm looking for something specific, but when you're looking for something randomly interesting it's worth a visit.
My employer has an electronic communications policy that forbids employee's from participating in the company's social networking sites unless it is their job to do so. We can't "like" their posts, or respond to tweets etc. I work in the financial industry, and the company is very protective of their credibility. We do have an internal social networking site to promote collaboration.
I think any company that tries to "stuff the ballot box" by making employees sign up for accounts is barking up the wrong tree. They'll have an active looking social networking presence, but it won't yield the benefits that having a real community of clients will.
I was reading Delete by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger recently and he has a very simple solution... put expiration dates on all data. I don't know that it's a basic human right to be forgotten, but it's pretty harsh to have a picture of one act of foolishness follow you around for 20 years.
So at what point do the actor's/actress' talents become obsolete?
Actors are still artists - a good actor can bring a lot to a performance even if they're just voice acting or mo-capped. Golum had a live actor bringing him to life, as did Sonny in I, Robot. The CGI folks drew heavily on the actor's portrayals. A lot of directors see their relationship with their actors as a collaboration and some tend to choose the same folks over and over because they work well together. From what I've seen in the special features sections of some animated movies, the voice actors are filmed while they're reading and some of that performance gets incorporated into the film. So I think there will be less room for mediocre actors, and the "extra" may become obsolete, but I think there will always be room for the person with a talent for acting or performance.
The bright side that I can see is that perhaps not having to put up with so many dumb, uneducated actors as public role models and political activists.
Well professors should lecture and artists should speak through their art. It's really annoying to get lectured when you're expecting art. People should stand for what they believe in because it's the right thing to do, not because all of the cool kids are doing it or because it helps their image.I think this vehement support of bots is pretty strange. What's the matter? Did the cost of having to re-purchase keys and replenish your stock because you've been banned cut into your farming profits? If the game bores you, don't play it. I don't play WoW, or EQ 2, or any subscription based game right now, although I've played most of them at on one time or the other until I wasn't getting my $15 worth of enjoyment out of them. Item and gold farming does ruin the game because it fucks up the economy. If nothing is done about it, then you end up with the folks that don't buy gold or bot unable "earn" any of the rewards.
In EQ2 my crafter was unable to harvest the rares needed for some weapons she wanted to make because there were 3 farmers working in tandem cherry picking the nodes that I needed - and they were there every time I had the opportunity to play and went to check. So, after realizing it was more frustrating than fun, I quit and found a different game. This argument that "if a game can be ruined simply by (fill in some anti-social behavior), it's a bad game to start with" is completely fatuous. MMOs are as much about the community as the game mechanic. If a company allows the botters and farmers to chase out the folks that are there to play (cooperatively or competitively), they'll lose money. Blizzard has already lost my money because I didn't buy the expansion and it had nothing to do with game mechanic and everything to do with community. Am I even a blip on Blizzard's WoW radar? Most certainly not, but based on how aggressively they are banning accounts I'd venture a guess that there are other folks out there that feel the same way that I do.
The only articles I've been able to find about this aren't exactly objective and haven't provided the actual text of the claims being made by Vivendi. While it's easy to hate the big conglomerate, I've had a number of games ruined for me because of bots/farmers (indirectly and directly) and tend to support action being taken to squash gold and item farming. I'm not sure that I would support action against the third party software providers (since they haven't agreed to the TOS) and I'm interested to see the exact nature of the claims Vivendi is making, uncolored by the bias of supporters of the folks being sued.
I did like the quests in the trial I tried out - the objectives actually felt like different tasks unlike the repetitive quests in the other MMOs like WoW and EQ. I just couldn't get past the complexity of the character development system. I get very attached to my little avatars and I hate feeling like I have to completely plan out my character before I start instead of letting them grow up as the game progresses. There were just too many choices and the differences among the choices weren't large enough to develop my character on the fly. I don't mind having to educate myself a little bit, but I would like to have the option to ignore some of the nuances in the beginning without feeling like I might be completely ruining my character.
Maybe my tinfoil hat is showing, but the first thing that sprang to my mind was "Great, now they have a way to track cash transactions". RFID chips in the currency, readers in the cash registers so you don't have to worry all that much about distance. They'll sell it as a way to prevent counterfeiting.
I had the same sort of thought. It's really frightening to think about making global climate changes when we don't understand enough about weather to accurately predict where a hurricane is going to make landfall far enough in advance to evacuate. I'm fairly sure that the world isn't going to end by humans blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons. I think it's far more likely that we're going to "fix" ourselves to death. The only thing that lets me sleep at night is the fact that we're unlikely to actually ever put together something that works on a global scale because any project where that much money is involved is going to fall victim to corruption, graft, and general power mongering.
Take the eruption of St. Helen - over 20 years later scientists are still learning about ecosystems and how they survive and recover from devastating disturbances. The ecosystem didn't respond at all the way scientists thought it might and they discovered natural mechanisms that they hadn't imagined could exist. Hell it wasn't that long ago that we thought putting out forest fires was a universally good thing. Regardless of whether or not man is responsible for global warming, we still don't understand the implications of trying to reverse it. We really don't know that the seas are going to rise, or that anything catastrophic is actually going to come to pass if global warming isn't stopped. The ecosystem is responding to a change to keep things functional (in the planetary sense), so maybe we shouldn't be going off half cocked trying to prevent the adjustment by introducing another change rather than gradually reversing the change we think is causing it (Hurry up and start increasing the pirate population people!). Maybe we should save our money for when the magnetic poles flip - that's probably going to be far more catastrophic from a human perspective. Everyone seems very concerned about the temperature rising, but not a lot of folks seem worried that our magnetic field is weakening which is potentially much worse.
I tell you what, why don't you climate scientists go learn how to "fix" droughts, ice storms, hurricanes, and other localized weather disasters that cause so much human suffering in the here and now and then we'll talk about letting you play with the entire planet for a disaster that may or may not happen sometime in the next 100 to 10000 years.
Capitalism works. The opportunity is there but whats holding Linux back (as I see it) is that Linux can't decide on standards among its various and diverse distros. Linux needs simulcrums for "Program Files" and the registry and the start menu. Choice is great, but software companies aren't going to take on maintaining software for 50 different platforms to reach 5% of the market. You aren't going to have enterprise level software on Linux until the tools are there for the enterprise level software developers. Linux is the smallest part of our sales and takes a disproportionate chunk of our maintenance resources. Until you give developers the tools to provide a professional consistent product across all of the major Linux flavors, Linux is going to remain a niche. Look at what all of the Windows flavors and Mac OSes have in common as features of the operating system, then subtract out what Linux doesn't do in all of its distros. That's what has to happen before Linux is going to be taken seriously by enterprise.
Where I surf and what pages I look at and various other tidbits about my personal preferences and habits are valuable commodities. Companies wouldn't be pursuing that information so aggressively if it didn't have any value. So if a hotel wants to offer me free internet service in exchange for letting them see where I go and serve ads to me, sure I might consider it. To take that information without informing me and offering some sort of consideration is just shady if not outright thievery. Charging me for the privilege of helping fill their coffers is insult added to injury. It's crap like this that makes me seriously consider going to law school. I'd love to try a case like this based on the idea that it's stealing and not privacy invasion.
I thought it was a stretch to say these employees were involved in an "abusive" relationship with their boss. Lots of folks, employees and supervisors included, are poor communicators and tend to shift blame for their unhappiness on to other people. What I got out of this article was that about 20% of people in the work force have some degree of unhappiness with their employment due to poor people/communication skills and don't know how to fix it. 9 out of 10 issues I've had with my bosses were communication problems and were easily sorted out if both of us were willing to act like professionals. Most of the worst situations, in my experience, were caused by folks who thought you had to be friends to work together (and therefore took everything way too personally) or folks that were afraid of confrontation and wouldn't speak up when they felt they were being wronged. If you don't confront someone you think is giving you the "silent treatment" how do you know that's what they're doing? Maybe they just don't have anything to say to you, or they're going deaf and are too embarrassed to get a hearing aid, or their dog died last night and they're depressed. Supervisors who are out to get someone from pure spite are very rare in my experience. If you keep running into abusive bosses in all the jobs you take, maybe the problem isn't your boss...
Nope, I read it as "A bar in NY" I'm glad you said something, because one is the loneliest number... Maybe the headline should read The New York Bar. Those little words we like to leave out on Internet (i.e. articles) might actually have some use after all...
I just thought folks might be interested to see what they were actually doing inside the message to try to track the e-mail. I was curious about how ReadNotify was going to pull off some of the claims that they make on their website. ReadNotify didn't track the e-mail I sent to myself because I use a client configured so it doesn't access anything over the network other than the mail server. All ReadNotify knew was that it had been delivered.
For those of y'all that are interested, I just signed up for their trial account and sent myself a message. Here are the interesting parts (truncated headers):
- Confirm-Reading-To: (testemailaddress).qocetpjmzkyyyua.emsvr.comu rn-Receipt-To: (testemailaddress).qocetpjmzkyyyua.emsvr.comi ce-Requested-Upon-Delivery-To: (testemailaddress).qocetpjmzkyyyuk.emsvr.como rs-To: (testemailaddress).qocetpjmzkyyyuk.emsvr.com
H TML><HEAD>t > <Img Border=0 Height=1 Width=3 Alt="" Lowsrc=""o tify.com/nocache/i4a8oxdx3u3tdv/rspr47.gif><Img moz-do-not-send="true" border=0 height=1 width=3 alt="" Lowsrc=http://www.i4a8oxdx3u3td8.ReadNotify.com/no cache/i4a8oxdx3u3td9/footer0.gif><Img moz-do-not-send="true" Border=0 Height=1 Width=2 Alt=""7 .gif ><STYLE TYPE='text/css'>@font-face {font-family: rnfont; src: url(http://i4a8oxdx3u3tdx.ReadNotify.com/fnt.asp/i 4a8oxdx3u3tdS.eot);}</STYLE><EmBed volume=-10000 Alt='' Lowsrc="" height=1 width=1i fy.com/nocache/i4a8oxdx3u3tdv/rspr47.wav>< table height=1 width=3 border=0><tr><tdr 47.gif> </td><td/ i4a8oxdx3u3tdX/rspr47.gif> </td><td style="font:arial;background-image:Url(http://www. i4a8oxdx3u3tdz.ReadNotify.com/nocache/i4a8oxdx3u3t dZ/rspr47.gif);"> </td></tr></table>a 8oxdx3u3tdp=4 frameborder=0 STYLE="width: 0; height: 0px; border:0px"></IfraMe><Img moz-do-not-send="true" Border=0 Height=1 Width=2 Alt=""x 3u3tdw/rspr47.gif></div><div><Link/Rel="stylesheet " TYPE="Text/CSS"a 8oxdx3u3tdj.css>& lrm;‏‍‍‎‎ ...)j ;‍‌‎</title>
X-Mai1er: RNwebmail
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Disposition-Notification-To: "them" <(testemailaddress).qocetpjmzkyyyua.emsvr.com>
X
Ret
Not
Err
<
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</HEAD><BODY><DIV></DIV><DIV>tes
</DIV>
<div alt="i4a8oxdx3u3td1."><pre> </pre><pre>
<br
Src=https://tssli.i4a8oxdx3u3tdv.ReadN
Lowsrc=http://www.readnotify.com/ca/rspr4
Src=https://tssle.i4a8oxdx3u3tdv.ReadNot
</pre>
background
=http://0320.185.62311/nocache/i4a8oxdx3u3tdP/rsp
background
=http://www.i4a8oxdx3u3tdx.ReadNotify.com/nocache
<IfraMe/width=1 height=1
Src
=http://www.i4a8oxdx3u3tdo.ReadNotify.com/ifrm?i4
Src=http://0320.185.62311/nocache/i4a8oxd
Href
=http://www.i4a8oxdx3u3tdi.ReadNotify.com/styl/i4
</div><div><title> A test message </title>
<title>‏‏‌‌‏‎
(... snip
‎‎‏‏‎‍‎‎&zw
<title> A test message </title>
</div alt="i4a8oxdx3u3td1."></BODY></HTML>
Can someone explain the IP address munging here? http://0320.185.62311/ How does that get mapped to readnotify.com?
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
We're stuck picking from the people who want the job, who are very unlikely to be the type of people that we want doing the job, regardless of their party affiliation. I wonder if we wouldn't be better off if Congress were run more like jury duty... your name gets pseudo-randomly selected, and off you go to do your civic duty.
For sites that need a "real" e-mail address to get in touch with me, I use http://sneakemail.com/ Everyone gets a unique address, so when the spam hits, I know where the spammer found the address. If someone starts abusing the privilege of being able to communicate with me electronically, I shut off the e-mail address, as one of my credit card companies discovered recently. All in all a very useful service for those of us that are too busy to set it up for ourselves.
I'm completely burnt on the standard elves and orcs MMO, but unfortunately of all the MMO's I've tried, these seem to have the best game play mechanics for how I like to play. I'd love to see a new MMO that has some depth to it with a different cultural setting. I don't particularly care if it's a romanticized view, so long as it's fun and different.
Since the game is set in 13th century Africa, I'm assuming "learn something about Africa" means "get the flavor of African mythology". The knight/castle/dragon games and stories aren't an accurate portrayal of medieval times, why should something based on African mythology be held to a different standard? Sure most of present day Africa is a political, economic, and sociological disaster zone. I'm not sure that has anything to do with the mythology of the different African cultures being an interesting setting for a game. I do think it's kind of a big chunk to bite off simply because of the diversity. The geography could make for some beautiful and varied locales to play in though.
Interesting point that alternative energy sources are only regionally effective. Maybe we should be focusing on the storage and transport of energy instead of collection. Then we just toss a few solar collection satellites in orbit where the weather can't affect their efficiency, and send it down in some manner more efficient than photons through an atmosphere.
In order to make an educated choice, the copy protection scheme needs to be on the box right along with the system requirements. I don't expect the box to tell me all the details of the scheme, just tell me which one it is, and I'll figure out for myself whether I want it on my system or not. I know for a fact that programs protected with Safedisc 2 won't run on one of my systems without extensive hoop-jumping and hair-pulling, so I consider "Safedisc compatible" a system requirement. I'd also like to know if a program is going to refuse to run unless I uninstall legitimate software from other companies, as was the case of Sims 2 vs CloneCD. Guess which program won... If "Incompatible with all popular CD/DVD burning software" was on the box I never would have wasted my money on it.
Shouldn't software companies be required to fully disclose all of the system requirements? Especially when just opening the box makes it extremely difficult to return the product and get your money back.