Xunker - Slashdot User

Submission + - Are 'Achievements' in Online Games Worth It? (kotaku.com)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Thursday November 01, 2007 @12:43PM

eldavojohn writes: "There's a brief rant by a writer from Kotaku who tells the story of losing his XBox360 'achievements' & rating. Instead of getting mad, throwing the controller & picking up a Steve Ballmer voodoo doll, he simply sat back and reflected on the inane requirements one must complete to achieve something so minuscule. Are we already back to grade school, walking around with the gold star stickers on our chest that we earned from tediously getting every math problem correct? Or, as the article puts it, "Jesus, since when was it fun to force yourself to play through parts of a game just to earn yourself an arbitrary point score?" Well?"

Yes Virginia, ISPs Have Silently Blocked Web Sites 204

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday March 21, 2007 @12:00PM from the something-to-think-about dept.

Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A recurring theme in editorials about Net Neutrality -- broadly defined as the principle that ISPs may not block or degrade access to sites based on their content or ownership (with exceptions for clearly delineated services like parental controls) -- is that it is a "solution in search of a problem", that ISPs in the free world have never actually blocked legal content on purpose. True, the movement is mostly motivated by statements by some ISPs about what they might do in the future, such as slow down customers' access to sites if the sites haven't paid a fast-lane "toll". But there was also an oft-forgotten episode in 2000 when it was revealed that two backbone providers, AboveNet and TeleGlobe, had been blocking users' access to certain Web sites for over a year -- not due to a configuration error, but by the choice of management within those companies. Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine. But I think this incident is more relevant than ever now -- not just because it shows that prolonged violations of Net Neutrality can happen, but because some of the people who organized or supported AboveNet's Web filtering, are people in fairly influential positions today, including the head of the Internet Systems Consortium, the head of the IRTF's Anti-Spam Research Group, and the operator of Spamhaus. Which begs the question: If they really believe that backbone companies have the right to silently block Web sites, are some of them headed for a rift with Net Neutrality supporters?" Read on for the rest of his story.

Journal Journal: Test entry

Journal by Xunker on Friday March 31, 2006 @03:12AM

This is a test journal entry.

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