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  • Blizzard Bans Users Who Break Terms of Use

    Joystiq and Game Girl Advance both reported on Blizzard banning accounts that were used for “Gold Farming” over the weekend. For those of you not familiar with the world of MMORPGs, Gold Farming is big business. People go around, and just kill monsters for high priced items and sell it off to make in-game money. They then sell the in-game money on places like ebay for real money. This is also done with rare magic items. The practice has been going on for ages. I remember hearing about people doing the same with Ultima Online and Evercrack.

    The thing I’m finding baffling about both the posts on this is they seem to be coming down hard on Blizzard. Joystiq asks:

    So, you pay for the game, pay your monthly subscription, only for Blizzard to say “you did something we don’t want you to do, goodbye”, and they kill your account. That’s $50 wasted since, as was reported a while back, you can’t transfer the serial number. Once it’s used, it’s used. Where should the line be drawn on what you can and can’t do in a game you pay for initially, and continue to pay for every month? If people are stupid enough to buy a game’s currency for hard cash, why shouldn’t that be a legitimate activity? [Joystiq]

    The answer is simple. You are breaking the policies that Blizzard has set forth for how they will run their game. This was not some secret policy that nobody knew of. On the World of Warcraft Policy Page it’s right at the top of the announcements link. They even say what they will do to people they catch doing it (Of course, this gets to an even larger rant I have about how people don’t read any of the game policies when playing). If this had come out of the blue I’d be able to understand complaints, but it didn’t.

    What do people think? If you are providing a service, should you be able to set the rules for the use of it? Does it matter if it is a game or something like an ISP? Or should having paid money immediately mean you can do what you want with that service, regardless of any Terms of Use?

  • Chickenpox Parties

    Uh. I really have no response to this. I saw the story and had to go listen. It’s just mindboggling.

    ‘Chickenpox Parties’ for Parents Wary of Inoculations
    Oregon is experiencing a growing phenomenon of “chickenpox parties” — events where parents wary of getting their kids inoculated against chickenpox knowingly expose them to infected children to build immunity. [via NPR News: Health & Science]

  • Get Up And Exercise

    McDonalds is starting a new ad compaign urging people to get some exercise.

    McDonald’s Says It’s Time to Exercise

    MCDONALD’S has a suggestion for Americans, who are becoming obese in alarming numbers: get some exercise.

    The company, under fire from those who say its food plays a role in the nation’s obesity problem, introduced a marketing campaign yesterday promoting physical activity as part of a balanced life. The theme: “It’s what I eat and what I do … I’m lovin’ it.”

    The campaign includes commercials that largely dispense with traditions like showing the product, the restaurants or people eating food. One spot even tells viewers, “Maybe you should spend less time with your TV.” [NYTimes]

  • Lazy Spammers

    Phil Ringnalda does some tests to see if spammers are smart enough to grab email addresses that have been escaped as numeric character references. I was surprised to find that spammers weren’t going this little extra mile.

    Spammers are lazy<

    Last July, wanting to prove that simplistic protection of email links by just escaping them as numeric character references (&#097;&#064;&#098;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109; to produce a@b.com) was a lousy idea — and how could it not be? even without any economic incentive, it wouldn’t take me long to write the code needed to harvest them just fine — I put an encoded SpamMotel address in my sidebar, along with a fresh address in the unprotected part of my accessibly spamproofed address. I figured it wouldn’t take long before the encoded address was getting just as spammed as the other.

    This morning, when I got my third actual email through the encoded one (I guess the “Harvester Test” headline wasn’t quite clear enough), I finally remembered to turn it off and take it out. The final tally, for the encoded address: 46 spams, 3 actual emails; for the unencoded address: 2632 spams. Apparently, if you don’t have time to really harden an address, it’s worth taking the time to at least convert it to NCRs. Lazy spammers. [via phil ringnalda dot com]

    I’ve argued for ages that just escaping email addresses like this was an example of security through obscurity. Of course I’m sure spammers everywhere will now be looking to change this.

  • Amazing Snow Sculptures

    Someone online mentioned a site with shots of the International Snow Sculpture Championships. The winning one is stunning. I’d love to see shots of it in the process of being sculpted.

  • Reason #4 I Dig World of Warcraft

    One of the things I love best about World of Warcraft is its sense of humor and pop culture references. I started a new undead character today and while running through starting area ran across three zombies. Their names: Daniel Ulfman, Karrel Grayves, and Stephen Bhartec. Every once in a while Daniel says things like “You really couldn’t blame him…”, “No one lives forever…”, and “Where’s the rest of the guys?”

    I couldn’t stop chuckling about it the whole time I was playing. Brilliant.

    Edit: And I just had to kill Samual Fipps.

  • The Guide

    Amazon.com currently has a new version of the trailer to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on their home page. I’m now not quite as nervous about the movie as I had been. It’s a decent trailer. Though I really hope a better video quality one gets released soon.

    And for some additional information on the movie, here’s an interview with the screenwriter who had the job of producing a final script. It’s a pretty interesting read.

  • World of Warcraft – Dealing with Success

    The New York Times had an interesting piece on Blizzard and their game World of Warcraft the other day. The game has blown away all sales projectections. As a result, Blizzard is having to scramble to do a level of expansion they’d plan to do over a year all at once.

    It was in the evening, right before the game was formally released on Nov. 23. Blizzard had arranged for producers and designers to sign copies of the game at midnight at a hangar-size Fry’s Electronics outlet in Fountain Valley, not far from Blizzard’s base in Irvine, 40 miles south of Los Angeles. The company had set up a similar signing for an earlier strategy game, Warcraft III, and about 700 people showed up. Planning optimistically, the company had about 2,500 copies of World of Warcraft on hand.

    “So I planned to roll over there around 11 p.m., and as I tried to get off the freeway I look over and I see this gigantic, dark, surging mass around Fry’s, and I’m like, ‘What in the world is that?’ ” said Paul Sams, 34, Blizzard’s senior vice president for business operations. It turned out that the pulsing was more than 5,000 people.

    “The cars were backed up on the off-ramp,” he said. “I parked like a mile away, and when I get there the line is looped around the building, and then looped around the parking lot. It was like a football tailgate, with the R.V.’s and barbecues in the lot and everything.”

    By the end of that first day, about 240,000 copies of the game had sold across North America, Australia and New Zealand, the product’s initial markets. The game has now sold almost 700,000 copies in those markets, and at peak hours about 250,000 people from those areas are playing the game simultaneously. [New York Times – Technology]

  • Mac Mini

    I’ve been a little quiet lately. Doing a bunch of reading and playing World of Warcraft. Somewhere in there Apple released the Mac Mini. I seriously want one. I’ve got an old B&W G3 it would replace just perfectly. I’d probably want the $599 one though. I kind of wish they offered a higher end one with the SuperDrive that wasn’t a custom build though.

    One thing I’ve found is that this has many numerous people I know who had been trying to avoid getting a mac finally take the plunge. Bout time Apple made a move like this. Btw, if you’re getting one, bump the memory up to at least 512MB if not a full gig. You’ll be happy you did.

  • Phone Support Hell

    Today I was calling my cell phone company to make a payment since I realized I’d spaced on paying that one online. Upon calling I discovered that they now have a voice driven menu system. So, first I had to say “I’d like to make a payment”, then say every little bit of information that was needed. First, saying this with any kind of cough is difficult, took me two tries for my credit card number. Second, it was slow.

    I could have been done with the phone call in about 1/3rd of the time if I hadn’t had to say it all. It’s a heck of a lot easier to key in all that stuff. The sad thing is that I bet this will become the norm because it is ‘cool’.