It's the same ignorance that makes people think it's perfectly fine and harmless to steal bandwidth by using img tags to link images from other sites, just a different flavour. I see people scream and whine about DeviantArt being run by 'facists' [sic] because they're too fucking lazy to check the AUPs, as one of many frustrating examples.
Of course, if the site doesn't have an AUP that covers a bit of material that's been uploaded and later removed... then there's a definite problem.
If you're at the point where you're discussing the strong possibility of starting a family, you owe it to your partner and yourself to be completely open about your medical history and that of your ancestors. Waiting until after what many people consider to be the point of no return is grossly unfair to your partner and the potential child.
It's even worse when there is no way to remove yourself from the rolls, or even contact an administrator. Someone used my e-mail address to sign up for some physical education tracking site that the US Navy set up, with bonuses for good work. Kids stuff, literally.
I only received confirmation that 'I' had signed up. There was no 'are you really you' e-mail before the account was activated (and I've been 'signed up' for any number of sites that let you post even before you confirm), no way of deactivating an account, and no contact information anywhere. To make matters worse, I kept getting e-mail from the site because this person was sending in bogus exercise information. I ended up having to add the site to my spam blacklist.
Seriously, people. Is it that bloody hard to build, buy, or borrow a simple e-mail confirmation script?
That was my first thought. It could be that they plan for a degree of relative portability, and would simply dredge it up and move it when sediment became too thick.
Are Bad Things intentional effects, or can they include weird, destructive side effects as well?
I installed NCSoft's 'Exteel', a localized version of a Korean game, complete with the Game Guard nanny app that's nigh-ubiquitous when it comes to Korean games. While it probably wasn't intentional, Game Guard did disable the interface for my uninterruptible power supply when it ran, and wouldn't allow the service to reactivate until after it shut itself down.
PayPal has a long history of closing accounts, dipping into bank accounts that are associated with accounts, freezing assets without recourse and generally being really shitty corporate citizens. Their status as an effective middleman is middling at best.
Seriously. The people who man the faxes aren't paid for customer retention, and certainly aren't going to fax back a note that reads 'R U shure'. Plus, there's the added benefit of having a receipt for the paper trail.
If you don't have a fax machine, you should be able to do it from your local copy shop or anywhere else that offers fax-for-fee services.
There was a PC game back in the days of DOS, that used the same gimmick. It came with a cheap headset mike, and would fire when you said 'fire'. It would also fire when you sneezed, and would waste ammo when you shouted at your Mom that you were busy doing something important and would she please leave you the fuck alone.
There's also Greasemonkey and a lovely little script called 'unfuck facebook'. I haven't been bothered by vampires biting me, pirates grabbing my booty, or idiotic shit on my friends' superwalls since I installed it.
The 'he's only a kid!' defense does not apply to someone who is legally an adult.
Also, he is an outright criminal. This isn't just Ferris Bueller slipping in to adjust his grades a little because he's too cool for school. Burglary, identity theft, multiple counts of fraud? Bueller? Bueller?
There's one post in that thread that says something very vague about an encrypted communication, and the rest advocates disconnecting your Internet connection. That's not news, it's hearsay.
Now, SecuROM in the installer-- that is worthy of note.
Simply stated, it's not in management's best interest to think beyond the next fiscal year or two. Massive rollouts of new technology or widening network backbones are simply not cost-effective in the short run.
The other side of things is that bandwidth usage isn't a constant-- much like TV, there's a definite 'prime time' when the networks are under heavy load, and laying new cable or provisioning new wireless devices just to cover those periods is not cost-effective.
There's also the real cost of bandwidth versus the gluttons who insist upon maxing their connections 24/7. Congratulations, guys. You're the reason why they're finally dropping the 'unlimited' charade. You want it unmetered, fresh from the backbone? Try leasing a T1, then get back to us on how cheap we're still getting it.
Precisely. They want their cake, and to eat it too. Unfortunately, they couldn't stop if they even wanted to: they're legally obligated to try to maximize profits. If they stopped, shrugged and said 'DVR wins', their member companies' shareholders would be filing lawsuits in an instant.
Unfortunately under this kind of economic regime, 'consumer' means less 'one who eats' and much more 'one who must be force-fed'.
What do you mean, 'once you hit 70'? The game is about getting new gear from the moment the little post-chargen cutscene ends. The only difference is, you run out of new backgrounds to hunt gear against when you hit 70. Doing twenty runs in the battlegrounds is little different from chewing through Gnomeregan a dozen times before the Electrocutioner drops a piece of gear you're desperate for (and make the need roll on), or running the same raids over and over again.
Okay, so there's two differences: At level 70, you're not going to outlevel the DPS or protection of whatever gear you eke out of faction rewards or instance runs. That is, until Wrath of the Lich King hits. Have fun disenchanting your high-tier sets and BG loot by the time you hit 72, and doing it all over again after you reach 80.
Given the development of World of Warcraft's UI, they'd add in bare bones hooks, wait for the player base to come up with something, then clone the code internally and make it official with a patch.
Meanwhile, outside the realm of ridiculous suppositions, Blizzard knows better than to waste money and manpower on something totally non-germane to their product.
Still, finding that particular entrance without aid was highly unlikely-- you had to be playing silly buggers to fall down that one specific waterfall in the middle of nowhere, in order to find your way in. That's how I did it the first time, and boy was that a surprise.
The specific tune for solving the harpsichord puzzle wasn't actually in the game, or at least not in the Apple II version-- the tune in the manual didn't match up with the tune in the game. There was one NPC who would give you the first three notes, and tell you to figure the next three out using the manual, and would go into one of those 'but thou must! Wilt thou? Y/N' style endless loops until you rebooted or figured out what he wanted. Then he'd give you the dozen-odd keystrokes you needed to play in LB's bedroom.
That reminds me of my favourite bit of copy protection. It was so elegant, I didn't even realize that it was more than just a bit of box fluff. Ultima 5 came with a whack of little things-- a symbol of infinity, a cloth map, a nice in-character manual describing creatures and spells and whatnot... and a narrow scroll that described the voyage of Lord British into the newly discovered Underworld, and his subsequent kidnapping by the Shadowlords.
Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across the entrance to the Underworld that they used, and found myself able to trace LB's path all the way to the great chamber where his fallen companions still lay. Without that miniature walkthrough, and one page in the manual, with one line of musical notation, written as apparently nothing more than a window on Britannian culture, I'd have never been able to finish the game.
Unfortunately the later games abandoned that completely. The documentation checks were all at the beginning of the game, and all referred to the bestiary, or lines of latitude and longitude on one of the included maps. What had once been pleasantly immersive (and a dirty, dirty trick on a cheap pirate) turned into a challenge and response to prove that you were the heroic Avatar. Kind of says something about the shift in the relationship between player and developer.
Yes, actually. Second Life's snapshot function is shit, EVE Online's internal web browser has (or at least had) a gigantic security hole in it, and most games' internal screenshot functions don't have the ability to crop, adjust colours for proper contrast, or anything else that I habitually use Photoshop for when showing in-game stuff off to friends.
Virtual World developers can barely be expected to get their core code right. Tacking web browsers, photo editing software and the like on is reinventing the wheel at best, and inviting novel intrusion schemes at worst. I can alt-tab and fiddle with a picture in an editor a lot faster and a lot more cleanly than some underpaid coder can hack a gimped Gimp together.
Yup. I remember the huge stealing nerf that came down, and one of the commentators at Lum the Mad summed the cause up as: "Thieves couldn't keep it in their pants." The same principle applied to open PVP there too, which is why the open PVP regions turned into ghost towns as soon as the PVE-only regions opened. The gate-gank squads that surrounded the gateways between PVE and PVP lands certainly didn't do their cause any help.
I strongly disliked the PC controls, personally. It was a basic JRPG interface with the added annoyance of having to mouse back and forth across the screen during combat sequences, instead of just tapping the D-pad to select items or enemies.
There's a PC demo: grab it to see if the controls jive for you.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a 3D world, it's simply a small-scale chatroom like IMVU or the Palace. Comparing it to Second Life is like comparing apples and bushels.
Of course, if the site doesn't have an AUP that covers a bit of material that's been uploaded and later removed... then there's a definite problem.
If you're at the point where you're discussing the strong possibility of starting a family, you owe it to your partner and yourself to be completely open about your medical history and that of your ancestors. Waiting until after what many people consider to be the point of no return is grossly unfair to your partner and the potential child.
I only received confirmation that 'I' had signed up. There was no 'are you really you' e-mail before the account was activated (and I've been 'signed up' for any number of sites that let you post even before you confirm), no way of deactivating an account, and no contact information anywhere. To make matters worse, I kept getting e-mail from the site because this person was sending in bogus exercise information. I ended up having to add the site to my spam blacklist.
Seriously, people. Is it that bloody hard to build, buy, or borrow a simple e-mail confirmation script?
That was my first thought. It could be that they plan for a degree of relative portability, and would simply dredge it up and move it when sediment became too thick.
I installed NCSoft's 'Exteel', a localized version of a Korean game, complete with the Game Guard nanny app that's nigh-ubiquitous when it comes to Korean games. While it probably wasn't intentional, Game Guard did disable the interface for my uninterruptible power supply when it ran, and wouldn't allow the service to reactivate until after it shut itself down.
PayPal has a long history of closing accounts, dipping into bank accounts that are associated with accounts, freezing assets without recourse and generally being really shitty corporate citizens. Their status as an effective middleman is middling at best.
If you don't have a fax machine, you should be able to do it from your local copy shop or anywhere else that offers fax-for-fee services.
The gem is working as intended.
There was a PC game back in the days of DOS, that used the same gimmick. It came with a cheap headset mike, and would fire when you said 'fire'. It would also fire when you sneezed, and would waste ammo when you shouted at your Mom that you were busy doing something important and would she please leave you the fuck alone.
There's also Greasemonkey and a lovely little script called 'unfuck facebook'. I haven't been bothered by vampires biting me, pirates grabbing my booty, or idiotic shit on my friends' superwalls since I installed it.
Also, he is an outright criminal. This isn't just Ferris Bueller slipping in to adjust his grades a little because he's too cool for school. Burglary, identity theft, multiple counts of fraud? Bueller? Bueller?
Now, SecuROM in the installer-- that is worthy of note.
The other side of things is that bandwidth usage isn't a constant-- much like TV, there's a definite 'prime time' when the networks are under heavy load, and laying new cable or provisioning new wireless devices just to cover those periods is not cost-effective.
There's also the real cost of bandwidth versus the gluttons who insist upon maxing their connections 24/7. Congratulations, guys. You're the reason why they're finally dropping the 'unlimited' charade. You want it unmetered, fresh from the backbone? Try leasing a T1, then get back to us on how cheap we're still getting it.
Unfortunately under this kind of economic regime, 'consumer' means less 'one who eats' and much more 'one who must be force-fed'.
Yahoo No Evil.
Okay, so there's two differences: At level 70, you're not going to outlevel the DPS or protection of whatever gear you eke out of faction rewards or instance runs. That is, until Wrath of the Lich King hits. Have fun disenchanting your high-tier sets and BG loot by the time you hit 72, and doing it all over again after you reach 80.
Meanwhile, outside the realm of ridiculous suppositions, Blizzard knows better than to waste money and manpower on something totally non-germane to their product.
The specific tune for solving the harpsichord puzzle wasn't actually in the game, or at least not in the Apple II version-- the tune in the manual didn't match up with the tune in the game. There was one NPC who would give you the first three notes, and tell you to figure the next three out using the manual, and would go into one of those 'but thou must! Wilt thou? Y/N' style endless loops until you rebooted or figured out what he wanted. Then he'd give you the dozen-odd keystrokes you needed to play in LB's bedroom.
Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across the entrance to the Underworld that they used, and found myself able to trace LB's path all the way to the great chamber where his fallen companions still lay. Without that miniature walkthrough, and one page in the manual, with one line of musical notation, written as apparently nothing more than a window on Britannian culture, I'd have never been able to finish the game.
Unfortunately the later games abandoned that completely. The documentation checks were all at the beginning of the game, and all referred to the bestiary, or lines of latitude and longitude on one of the included maps. What had once been pleasantly immersive (and a dirty, dirty trick on a cheap pirate) turned into a challenge and response to prove that you were the heroic Avatar. Kind of says something about the shift in the relationship between player and developer.
Virtual World developers can barely be expected to get their core code right. Tacking web browsers, photo editing software and the like on is reinventing the wheel at best, and inviting novel intrusion schemes at worst. I can alt-tab and fiddle with a picture in an editor a lot faster and a lot more cleanly than some underpaid coder can hack a gimped Gimp together.
Yup. I remember the huge stealing nerf that came down, and one of the commentators at Lum the Mad summed the cause up as: "Thieves couldn't keep it in their pants." The same principle applied to open PVP there too, which is why the open PVP regions turned into ghost towns as soon as the PVE-only regions opened. The gate-gank squads that surrounded the gateways between PVE and PVP lands certainly didn't do their cause any help.
The operative word here is WOULD. Not WILL, but WOULD.
The only implication here is that the movie will take roughly two game development cycles to produce.
There's a PC demo: grab it to see if the controls jive for you.