SECRETARY GATES stumbles in from an adjoining room, bleary-eyed. Another all-nighter of trying to keep the world safe for democracy.
SECRETARY GATES: What the blazes is it now?
He picks up his Big Red Phone.
SECRETARY GATES: Gates here. What is it?
TECH #1: Sir! This is Collins at Central. We've got a situation -- massive DOS, widely distributed. One of the worst yet.
SECRETARY GATES: Damn! Tell me it's not--
TECH #1: Bad news, sir. It's your brother.
BILL GATES: Mwa ha ha ha!
SECRETARY GATES: Curse you, Bill! What infernal scheme have you cooked up now?
BILL GATES: By making Windows insecure and ensuring its worldwide adoption, I now have an army of millions of zombie computers at my disposal! I will instruct them to PERMANENTLY destroy your computer network unless you pay me... <pinky>one hundred BEEEELLYON dollars!</pinky>
SECRETARY GATES: But... you already have billions of dollars!
BILL GATES: Yes, but Mother always liked you better, so now I'm overcompensating. Top of the world, ma!
Nobody buys AMD? That's funny, my wife and I always buy AMD. In fact, I bought an AMD CPU about two months ago when I built a new gaming box. I guess you meant that *almost* nobody buys AMD.:)
Honestly, I believe that this administration has fucked up so bad that there is no shock element any more. Compared to Bush, Nixon was a saint, and Carter was as accomplished as FDR.
I'm a Democrat through and through, and spent the 80s listening to my parents curse Reagan's name daily. As I got older I grew to understand why they hated him so much.
The day I knew how bad things had really gotten was a couple of years ago when I was sitting around with my parents talking about politics, and I said, "You know, I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Ronald Reagan." If I'd said that in 1999 my parents probably would have disowned me. In 2004, they just nodded sagely.
Good luck, gold farmers are on ore veins the moment they appear.
In theory, yeah, but in practice, there just aren't that many farmers compared to the available space and the bulk of the population. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been inconvenienced by farmers, and it was always in the same place -- the demon camps in northern Azshara.
Oh boo hoo! They took virtually no financial risk, and they got a $62 million payday out of it? And what, we're supposed to feel sorry for the giant corporation?
I really hate the whole "Genuine" part of the name. They're using "genuine" to mean "licensed", because as everyone knows, the only difference between the copy of XP my roommate bought from the store and the copy of XP I burned from his legit CD is that his copy is legally licensed and mine's not. They're bit-for-bit identical and there is no way to tell the difference.
I know the intent is to find the nefarious PC sellers who buy one copy of XP and install it on every machine they sell, but I'm still getting the exact same sequence of bits on my hard drive in that case that I would have if the nefarious PC seller had actually bought a license for each computer he sold.
Fundamentally, it's an attempt to conflate information "property" with physical property in the minds of the public -- even though we know that a "non-genuine" copy of Windows is bit-identical and functionally identical to a "genuine" copy, MS wants people to think that a non-genuine copy has something wrong with it. There IS a legitimate concern about illegit copies that have been modified to include spyware/viruses/etc., but it's entirely possible for such a copy to pass as "genuine" since the software that validates "genuine"-ness won't always know about malicious software (especially if said software is specifically designed to hide from WGA...).
I'm not against copyright and licensing (I'm in favor of much shorter copyright durations, and yes, I produce copyrighted material for a living), but I AM against this attempt to abuse the language.
What difference does it make whether there are nine things we call "planets," or eight, or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand? I suppose "planet" is a less special term if there's a lot of them, but we already know there are hundreds out there already; so what if there's a hundred in our solar system, or only fifty, or whatever. Seriously, what difference does it make to anything?
The physical and orbital characteristics of Pluto and Eris will remain the same regardless of whether we call them planets or minor planets or dwarf planets.
One common meme in the toilet seat up/down argument is that it sucks when, in the middle of the night, you get up to go pee and have to determine whether the seat is up or down. Like this is apparently difficult, because there is NO LIGHT OF ANY KIND in the bathroom. It's apparently pitch-black.
The hell? I've lived in half a dozen different places in my life and none of them have ever come CLOSE to being pitch black at night. Streetlights? Ambient sky glow (I live in Los Angeles)? LEDs on clocks and such? Yes, I know it's dark, but your eyes adjust -- I can see just fine when I wake up in the middle of the night, because my eyes have just spent the last couple of hours dilating. How exactly is it happening that people just can't see anything?
(For the record, my wife and I both always leave the seat down; I pee sitting down if there's no urinal, so it's never been an issue.)
Does anyone ever actually read these "book review" "comments", or just copy and paste it from the last book review article? Seriously, the whole comment is so unoriginal that no proper moderator would give it +1 insightful. Couple that with the traditional sarcasm and I didn't want to read any further.
But I did. And lo and behold it's a typical "Slashdot 'review'" "comment", consisting of three paragraphs (if you can call them that!) criticizing the article generally, then specifically criticizing it, then summarizing with a snarky grade-school analogy.
If this was a comment on Fark, you might slide by with a "You suck," but otherwise you get a "goatse.cx link".
This, by itself, I don't see as valid -- it's difficult to remember any large list of things, regardless of whether they're all included by default. However:
This is compounded by the inconsistent naming, and the inconsistent arguments and return values.
This, I definitely agree with, and it is harder to remember any list of things when they're inconsistently named, so alleviating this would alleviate the first issue. Plus, namespaces would help a great deal.
It means you have to keep referring to some sort of reference...
Uh, you'd still need a reference even if PHP only had a couple hundred functions by default. No significant number of people is going to be able to memorize the names and argument/return syntax for 300 functions. Modularization wouldn't help, you'd still need a function reference for each module. Which is, in fact, exactly what PHP has.
PHP DOES have a problem where there are some functions which do almost exactly the same thing, and they could be combined, but that's a separate issue.
I think that all but a few core groups should be handled in modules that are loaded at run-time
Backward-compatibility aside, it'd probably be a perormance issue to be loading those modules every single fork -- the company I work for has 300+ web servers constantly at full load, running dozens of PHP theads per second each. Having to runtime-load all the modules we'd need (a dozen of them at least) on each thread would probably bog things down quite a lot. (Yes, yes, I realize that if performance is an issue, we shouldn't be using PHP, but we're stuck with it short a complete site rewrite which would take ten programmers a year to do -- you got a million bucks lying around to pay for that?)
Don't you think the fact that this happens 'legitimately' points to a flaw in your game?
Yes, but -- redesigning the game to fix the flaws is impossible at this point, because we'd have to fundamentally alter the way everything about the game works, which is not ever going to happen for the following reasons:
1) The players are used to it being the way it is. Fundamentally changing everything would piss off most of our users and we'd lose a huge number of them for many months, which would have a huge negative impact on our finances (we're mostly ad-supported).
2) We are constantly adding new features to the site, which takes up most of the resources of our development staff. Completely redoing the entire site would mean we'd either have to put all those things on hold for upwards of a year (yes, we've looked into rewriting the entire site -- 10,000+ individual pages -- no, I'm not kidding), or we'd have to hire a dozen more programmers to redo everything, which would mean payroll for a dozen more people, which (at going rates for good programmers) would mean another million dollars a year in salary, benefits, other costs, etc.
3) The actual *cost* to us to deal with policing this stuff is significantly less than the cost of overhauling the entire system to prevent it (which, in any complicated economy, can't be done anyway -- the best we can do is mitigate it).
To put it another way, the damage to the system in lost players who get pissed that other people can buy resources for cash is less than the damage to the system from trying to change everything in order to fix it.
*I* certainly don't transfer large amounts of wealth to complete strangers in the real world. Nobody does. Why is it happening in these games?
Because the games don't accurately model the real world. And they shouldn't. They're games. Real-world financial systems analogies only go so far in game systems ilke this. In WoW, for example, the cost to produce something is essentially just time. If I decide that in exchange for my time, I'm having fun, then I can sell whatever resources I gather for half what the next lowest price is, and I'm still ahead of the game, because I personally have gained fun in exchange for my time. Whatever money I can sell the resources for is a bonus. That's why I personally always sell everything for just lower than the lowest current price on the auction house: I hate auctions that don't sell much more than I hate not making as much money as I potentially could.
The real goal should not be to police the economy, but ultimately to design an economy that really doesn't need to be policed.
The holy grail of game economy design -- but it's fundamentally impossible if the economy is complex enough to be interesting. A stable, lively, interesting economy that needs as minimal policing as possible, sure, that's great -- but the actual "minimal" amount is pretty high, in real-world terms, and there are fundamental restrictions on it going any lower.
I think part of what you're missing is that a lot of the controls you propose putting on the game make the game a lot less fun. For example, the "if a guild gives you stuff, it remains the guild's property" -- okay, well how is that implemented? If you leave the guild after a year, those items fall off your character? That's no fun, players hate that kind of thing. It might be feasible as a mechanism to prevent people from joining a guild, getting a bunch of stuff, and then skipping out -- but that's a totally different issue than trying to prevent people from selling each other items in the real world. You end up penalizing the vast majority of players who don't buy/sell in the real world, in order to stop those who do.
Believe me, we've put a number of things into place to prevent real-world buy/sell stuff, and most of the things we've tried that are similar to what you suggest, the players have
I know a couple of people who have bought gold or PLing services in WoW, not because they want to "cheat," exactly, but because they've already played through the low-level content three or four times, and have decided that they want a level 70 character of some class they haven't raised up themselves. One particular person I'm thinking of is in a big raiding guild on a PVP server, and the guild needed more priests or whatever class, and so he bought one to play (he already had maxlevel chars of other classes that he HAD leveled himself).
I've known of some other folks who got into a game because their friends had been playing for a while, and wanted to do the high-level raiding with them without going through the low-level stuff. So they buy a high-level character to go raiding with. Most of these cases were people who had legitimately raised a character, played it for a while, and then decided they were gonna quit -- well, no use throwing away a level 70, so they'd sell it to someone else who wanted to play. Not a powerleveling service, like p4hire.net or whatever.
Anyway, my point is it's not always as cut-and-dry as wanting to cheat to win, like an athlete on steroids. There's other reasons people buy high-level characters.
but the heroine junkies are still going to inject their rent money and end up on the streets where they'll smash your window for spare change and pawn-able items to get their next fix (now at the 7-11).
Not quite. If heroin is legal, then for one thing, it's also a hell of a lot cheaper, because big companies will produce it in large enough quantities to see economies of scale, there'll be competition, etc. It doesn't take their entire month's rent money to buy enough to get high. (You can only inject so much heroin before you OD, anyway, so there's a limit to how much heroin one junkie will buy per unit time. It's the same as with cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
For another thing, when it's legal, it's also a lot easier to get support for trying to kick the habit, or at least manage it -- there's no fear of being arrested if you reveal that you shoot up, so addicts are a lot more likely to seek help.
It is funny, though, how people come up with these "obvious" schemes that Blizzard should implement to stop gold farmers... as if Blizzard hasn't spent the last three years putting a huge amount of thought into the situation:) (I work for a website that has exactly the same issues of people buying game resources for cash, so trust me, I'm familiar with it inside-out. It's not one percent as easy as the situation might seem. For example, we have *enormous* legitimate resource transfers all the time between players where there's no cash transactions going on. Picking the wheat from the chaff -- especially when we have no way to PROVE that person A paid money to person B, since that transaction happened on a website we have no control over -- is like finding one particular grain of wheat in a wheat field.)
Presumably these people wouldn't join a tennis league and then demand to use an oversize racquet because they're too busy with their job to learn to play skillfully. Would they think it acceptable to buy points in some sort of sports fantasy league from another player because they don't have the time to properly manage their team?
No, they wouldn't think it's acceptable, because they know they can't get away with it. If I play in a tennis league and my racket is larger, people will be able to tell, and they won't let me play. But Blizzard has no way to know (aside from difficult, unreliable research) whether Joe gave me 50 gold because we're pals, or because I paid him cash.
I've been playing WoW off and on since beta, but I've never bought gold or powerleveling services, because I don't desire to. Other people want to, and know they can get away with it.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you're being awfully naive. You may as well act bewildered about why people would commit crimes in real life, when they could just play fair!
I wanted to discuss this one... I've heard this particular criticism of PHP many times, although I haven't seen any suggestions about what precisely PHP should do to fix this. (Or what precisely is wrong with having a lot of functions in the "core," a term which is also unclear.)
A fresh PHP 5 install with no optional libraries included has 1,282 functions defined. Is that a lot? The standard C library has around 300 functions. A lot of PHP's functions are things that are commonly useful in the web environments where it's used. I mean, you probably could pare it down some, but you'd start removing functions that a lot of people actually do use. Why stop there? You could simply include no functions by default, except maybe the basic array and variable manipulation functions, I guess, but to what end? Most people would end up having to go through and figure out what to enable, and then... well, the end result is, PHP just wouldn't be as popular as it is now, for better or worse.:) The kitchen-sink approach probably happened because a fair number of people wanted those functions...
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot about PHP I'd like to see fixed (namespaces, normalizing function naming/parameter order/return values, various quirks). But I just don't see the "too many functions" argument as being a valid one.
Actually, my privacy concern is more about: what if delicious gets hacked, or has someone nefarious working on the inside, etc., or a bug temporarily makes non-shared bookmarks shareable, etc.? Having my data on someone else's server at all is what I want to avoid.
Central bookmark storage sounds like a great idea, but I'd rather not store my bookmarks on a server I don't control. For one thing, I don't want other people to know what I have bookmarked. For another, I've got a few logins bookmarked with the password in the query string, and I'm not letting that sit on someone else's server. (Yes, I know that my email server isn't under my control, but then I use POP, so the emails are only on that server for a few minutes before I download them and delete them. And I'd prefer to run my own email server, but there's problems with that.)
But I've got my own Linux box at home that I'd love to centralize my work and home bookmarks on; an ideal system would retrieve bookmarks on browser startup, and cache them locally, so that if it couldn't retrieve them the next time it started up, it could still use the cached copy. When I update my bookmarks anywhere, it contacts my bookmark server and tells it to update the master list. Combine that with Subversion for a permanent history, that'd be nice.
Tang was created in 1957 or so, and had nothing to do with the space program until they started using it during Gemini.
That aside, the answer to your question is that we don't know what we're going to learn from projects like this. But we do fundamental research like this anyway, for a variety of reasons best expressed by this article.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, in Canada it'll be called the DMC, eh?
Scene: Secretary Gates's office - dawn
A PERSISTENT BEEPING breaks the stillness.
SECRETARY GATES stumbles in from an adjoining room, bleary-eyed. Another all-nighter of trying to keep the world safe for democracy.
SECRETARY GATES: What the blazes is it now?
He picks up his Big Red Phone.
SECRETARY GATES: Gates here. What is it?
TECH #1: Sir! This is Collins at Central. We've got a situation -- massive DOS, widely distributed. One of the worst yet.
SECRETARY GATES: Damn! Tell me it's not--
TECH #1: Bad news, sir. It's your brother.
BILL GATES: Mwa ha ha ha!
SECRETARY GATES: Curse you, Bill! What infernal scheme have you cooked up now?
BILL GATES: By making Windows insecure and ensuring its worldwide adoption, I now have an army of millions of zombie computers at my disposal! I will instruct them to PERMANENTLY destroy your computer network unless you pay me... <pinky>one hundred BEEEELLYON dollars!</pinky>
SECRETARY GATES: But... you already have billions of dollars!
BILL GATES: Yes, but Mother always liked you better, so now I'm overcompensating. Top of the world, ma!
JAMES CAGNEY'S GHOST: Cut that out!
...is "unscientific poll."
Wait, that's two words. Okay, my least favorite word is "unscientificpoll". It rhymes with "folksonomy".
Nobody buys AMD? That's funny, my wife and I always buy AMD. In fact, I bought an AMD CPU about two months ago when I built a new gaming box. I guess you meant that *almost* nobody buys AMD. :)
I'm a Democrat through and through, and spent the 80s listening to my parents curse Reagan's name daily. As I got older I grew to understand why they hated him so much.
The day I knew how bad things had really gotten was a couple of years ago when I was sitting around with my parents talking about politics, and I said, "You know, I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Ronald Reagan." If I'd said that in 1999 my parents probably would have disowned me. In 2004, they just nodded sagely.
In theory, yeah, but in practice, there just aren't that many farmers compared to the available space and the bulk of the population. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been inconvenienced by farmers, and it was always in the same place -- the demon camps in northern Azshara.
Oh boo hoo! They took virtually no financial risk, and they got a $62 million payday out of it? And what, we're supposed to feel sorry for the giant corporation?
I really hate the whole "Genuine" part of the name. They're using "genuine" to mean "licensed", because as everyone knows, the only difference between the copy of XP my roommate bought from the store and the copy of XP I burned from his legit CD is that his copy is legally licensed and mine's not. They're bit-for-bit identical and there is no way to tell the difference.
I know the intent is to find the nefarious PC sellers who buy one copy of XP and install it on every machine they sell, but I'm still getting the exact same sequence of bits on my hard drive in that case that I would have if the nefarious PC seller had actually bought a license for each computer he sold.
Fundamentally, it's an attempt to conflate information "property" with physical property in the minds of the public -- even though we know that a "non-genuine" copy of Windows is bit-identical and functionally identical to a "genuine" copy, MS wants people to think that a non-genuine copy has something wrong with it. There IS a legitimate concern about illegit copies that have been modified to include spyware/viruses/etc., but it's entirely possible for such a copy to pass as "genuine" since the software that validates "genuine"-ness won't always know about malicious software (especially if said software is specifically designed to hide from WGA...).
I'm not against copyright and licensing (I'm in favor of much shorter copyright durations, and yes, I produce copyrighted material for a living), but I AM against this attempt to abuse the language.
What difference does it make whether there are nine things we call "planets," or eight, or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand? I suppose "planet" is a less special term if there's a lot of them, but we already know there are hundreds out there already; so what if there's a hundred in our solar system, or only fifty, or whatever. Seriously, what difference does it make to anything?
The physical and orbital characteristics of Pluto and Eris will remain the same regardless of whether we call them planets or minor planets or dwarf planets.
Amen to that! Now hand me that hydrospanner so that I can adjust the alluvial dampers.
Yeah, because they probably wouldn't have trained the soldiers to know that they might get rescued by these robots.
One common meme in the toilet seat up/down argument is that it sucks when, in the middle of the night, you get up to go pee and have to determine whether the seat is up or down. Like this is apparently difficult, because there is NO LIGHT OF ANY KIND in the bathroom. It's apparently pitch-black.
The hell? I've lived in half a dozen different places in my life and none of them have ever come CLOSE to being pitch black at night. Streetlights? Ambient sky glow (I live in Los Angeles)? LEDs on clocks and such? Yes, I know it's dark, but your eyes adjust -- I can see just fine when I wake up in the middle of the night, because my eyes have just spent the last couple of hours dilating. How exactly is it happening that people just can't see anything?
(For the record, my wife and I both always leave the seat down; I pee sitting down if there's no urinal, so it's never been an issue.)
Does anyone ever actually read these "book review" "comments", or just copy and paste it from the last book review article? Seriously, the whole comment is so unoriginal that no proper moderator would give it +1 insightful. Couple that with the traditional sarcasm and I didn't want to read any further.
But I did. And lo and behold it's a typical "Slashdot 'review'" "comment", consisting of three paragraphs (if you can call them that!) criticizing the article generally, then specifically criticizing it, then summarizing with a snarky grade-school analogy.
If this was a comment on Fark, you might slide by with a "You suck," but otherwise you get a "goatse.cx link".
This, by itself, I don't see as valid -- it's difficult to remember any large list of things, regardless of whether they're all included by default. However:
This, I definitely agree with, and it is harder to remember any list of things when they're inconsistently named, so alleviating this would alleviate the first issue. Plus, namespaces would help a great deal.
Uh, you'd still need a reference even if PHP only had a couple hundred functions by default. No significant number of people is going to be able to memorize the names and argument/return syntax for 300 functions. Modularization wouldn't help, you'd still need a function reference for each module. Which is, in fact, exactly what PHP has.
PHP DOES have a problem where there are some functions which do almost exactly the same thing, and they could be combined, but that's a separate issue.
Backward-compatibility aside, it'd probably be a perormance issue to be loading those modules every single fork -- the company I work for has 300+ web servers constantly at full load, running dozens of PHP theads per second each. Having to runtime-load all the modules we'd need (a dozen of them at least) on each thread would probably bog things down quite a lot. (Yes, yes, I realize that if performance is an issue, we shouldn't be using PHP, but we're stuck with it short a complete site rewrite which would take ten programmers a year to do -- you got a million bucks lying around to pay for that?)
Yes, but -- redesigning the game to fix the flaws is impossible at this point, because we'd have to fundamentally alter the way everything about the game works, which is not ever going to happen for the following reasons:
1) The players are used to it being the way it is. Fundamentally changing everything would piss off most of our users and we'd lose a huge number of them for many months, which would have a huge negative impact on our finances (we're mostly ad-supported).
2) We are constantly adding new features to the site, which takes up most of the resources of our development staff. Completely redoing the entire site would mean we'd either have to put all those things on hold for upwards of a year (yes, we've looked into rewriting the entire site -- 10,000+ individual pages -- no, I'm not kidding), or we'd have to hire a dozen more programmers to redo everything, which would mean payroll for a dozen more people, which (at going rates for good programmers) would mean another million dollars a year in salary, benefits, other costs, etc.
3) The actual *cost* to us to deal with policing this stuff is significantly less than the cost of overhauling the entire system to prevent it (which, in any complicated economy, can't be done anyway -- the best we can do is mitigate it).
To put it another way, the damage to the system in lost players who get pissed that other people can buy resources for cash is less than the damage to the system from trying to change everything in order to fix it.
Because the games don't accurately model the real world. And they shouldn't. They're games. Real-world financial systems analogies only go so far in game systems ilke this. In WoW, for example, the cost to produce something is essentially just time. If I decide that in exchange for my time, I'm having fun, then I can sell whatever resources I gather for half what the next lowest price is, and I'm still ahead of the game, because I personally have gained fun in exchange for my time. Whatever money I can sell the resources for is a bonus. That's why I personally always sell everything for just lower than the lowest current price on the auction house: I hate auctions that don't sell much more than I hate not making as much money as I potentially could.
The holy grail of game economy design -- but it's fundamentally impossible if the economy is complex enough to be interesting. A stable, lively, interesting economy that needs as minimal policing as possible, sure, that's great -- but the actual "minimal" amount is pretty high, in real-world terms, and there are fundamental restrictions on it going any lower.
I think part of what you're missing is that a lot of the controls you propose putting on the game make the game a lot less fun. For example, the "if a guild gives you stuff, it remains the guild's property" -- okay, well how is that implemented? If you leave the guild after a year, those items fall off your character? That's no fun, players hate that kind of thing. It might be feasible as a mechanism to prevent people from joining a guild, getting a bunch of stuff, and then skipping out -- but that's a totally different issue than trying to prevent people from selling each other items in the real world. You end up penalizing the vast majority of players who don't buy/sell in the real world, in order to stop those who do.
Believe me, we've put a number of things into place to prevent real-world buy/sell stuff, and most of the things we've tried that are similar to what you suggest, the players have
I know a couple of people who have bought gold or PLing services in WoW, not because they want to "cheat," exactly, but because they've already played through the low-level content three or four times, and have decided that they want a level 70 character of some class they haven't raised up themselves. One particular person I'm thinking of is in a big raiding guild on a PVP server, and the guild needed more priests or whatever class, and so he bought one to play (he already had maxlevel chars of other classes that he HAD leveled himself).
I've known of some other folks who got into a game because their friends had been playing for a while, and wanted to do the high-level raiding with them without going through the low-level stuff. So they buy a high-level character to go raiding with. Most of these cases were people who had legitimately raised a character, played it for a while, and then decided they were gonna quit -- well, no use throwing away a level 70, so they'd sell it to someone else who wanted to play. Not a powerleveling service, like p4hire.net or whatever.
Anyway, my point is it's not always as cut-and-dry as wanting to cheat to win, like an athlete on steroids. There's other reasons people buy high-level characters.
Not quite. If heroin is legal, then for one thing, it's also a hell of a lot cheaper, because big companies will produce it in large enough quantities to see economies of scale, there'll be competition, etc. It doesn't take their entire month's rent money to buy enough to get high. (You can only inject so much heroin before you OD, anyway, so there's a limit to how much heroin one junkie will buy per unit time. It's the same as with cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
For another thing, when it's legal, it's also a lot easier to get support for trying to kick the habit, or at least manage it -- there's no fear of being arrested if you reveal that you shoot up, so addicts are a lot more likely to seek help.
It is funny, though, how people come up with these "obvious" schemes that Blizzard should implement to stop gold farmers... as if Blizzard hasn't spent the last three years putting a huge amount of thought into the situation
No, they wouldn't think it's acceptable, because they know they can't get away with it. If I play in a tennis league and my racket is larger, people will be able to tell, and they won't let me play. But Blizzard has no way to know (aside from difficult, unreliable research) whether Joe gave me 50 gold because we're pals, or because I paid him cash.
I've been playing WoW off and on since beta, but I've never bought gold or powerleveling services, because I don't desire to. Other people want to, and know they can get away with it.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you're being awfully naive. You may as well act bewildered about why people would commit crimes in real life, when they could just play fair!
I wanted to discuss this one... I've heard this particular criticism of PHP many times, although I haven't seen any suggestions about what precisely PHP should do to fix this. (Or what precisely is wrong with having a lot of functions in the "core," a term which is also unclear.)
A fresh PHP 5 install with no optional libraries included has 1,282 functions defined. Is that a lot? The standard C library has around 300 functions. A lot of PHP's functions are things that are commonly useful in the web environments where it's used. I mean, you probably could pare it down some, but you'd start removing functions that a lot of people actually do use. Why stop there? You could simply include no functions by default, except maybe the basic array and variable manipulation functions, I guess, but to what end? Most people would end up having to go through and figure out what to enable, and then... well, the end result is, PHP just wouldn't be as popular as it is now, for better or worse.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot about PHP I'd like to see fixed (namespaces, normalizing function naming/parameter order/return values, various quirks). But I just don't see the "too many functions" argument as being a valid one.
Actually, my privacy concern is more about: what if delicious gets hacked, or has someone nefarious working on the inside, etc., or a bug temporarily makes non-shared bookmarks shareable, etc.? Having my data on someone else's server at all is what I want to avoid.
Central bookmark storage sounds like a great idea, but I'd rather not store my bookmarks on a server I don't control. For one thing, I don't want other people to know what I have bookmarked. For another, I've got a few logins bookmarked with the password in the query string, and I'm not letting that sit on someone else's server. (Yes, I know that my email server isn't under my control, but then I use POP, so the emails are only on that server for a few minutes before I download them and delete them. And I'd prefer to run my own email server, but there's problems with that.)
But I've got my own Linux box at home that I'd love to centralize my work and home bookmarks on; an ideal system would retrieve bookmarks on browser startup, and cache them locally, so that if it couldn't retrieve them the next time it started up, it could still use the cached copy. When I update my bookmarks anywhere, it contacts my bookmark server and tells it to update the master list. Combine that with Subversion for a permanent history, that'd be nice.
Good grief. Some of us don't have hearing sensitive enough that we can even *tell* the difference between a $200 and $2000 sound system.
Tang was created in 1957 or so, and had nothing to do with the space program until they started using it during Gemini.
That aside, the answer to your question is that we don't know what we're going to learn from projects like this. But we do fundamental research like this anyway, for a variety of reasons best expressed by this article.
Now how about a damn picture?
Sure. He looks a lot more like a scientist/intellectual there