Comment Re:Water textures updated! (Score 1) 297
I got a chance to play this at Blizzcon and the new water effects are amazing. Both above and under water :)
Comment Re:It will still communicate over Lan (Score 1) 737
That would pretty much mean every game is hosted on Blizzard's dedicated servers. That would create for some pretty crazy bandwidth. Also, there would have to be some limit on the number of games if you did that. I'm pretty sure all Battle.Net is going to do is setup matches and then the two (or more) people will connect with each other.
Comment Re:It will still communicate over Lan (Score 1) 737
Once the game starts though the packets would never be leaving the network. Right now people can be on the same external ip and be using two different Wow accounts so I don't think that would be any different.
Comment It will still communicate over Lan (Score 1) 737
It is my understanding that people who are on the same LAN and are playing with each other will still be sending the actual gameplay packets to each others LAN ip address without having to first pass through Battle.Net.
All Battle.Net will be doing is authenticating the game and setting up matches and keeping various stats. That said we won't know for sure till the beta is released or Blizzard confirms or denies it.
Comment Re:Namespaces...about time! (Score 1) 120
Don't get me wrong, I love that they've added namespaces but I hate how they've implemented it with the backslashes.
Comment Re:it is sad.. (Score 1) 441
No, the really sad part is that people like you except the notion that he got what he was asking for.
Comment Re:Listen... (Score 1) 263
Progress is progress. Where ever people fight for more liberty the free people of the world should stand behind them. While it may not result in all the freedoms we can hope for it still puts the fear of the people into the government, which is never a bad thing. Also, for Iran economic policy can quickly become foreign policy. Being cut off from the rest of the world via sanctions has not helped there economy at all.
Comment Re:Google mashup? (Score 1) 695
Oh nice, the three san diego ones are 10min from my house.
Comment Re:In other news (Score 1) 266
Is that why there is a sudden outbreak of swine flu?
Comment Re:the governments track record is actually pretty (Score 2, Informative) 1385
Medicare has a much higher rate of fraud though.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121944730222565137.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
True, Medicare's administrative costs are just 3% of total spending, while the private sector hits 11% to 14%. But insurance companies spend money to screen their claims for fraud. Medicare automatically pays more than 95% of the bills it receives. This lack of scrutiny reduces overhead, but it makes the program highly vulnerable to abuse.
Comment I gotta be honest... (Score 5, Funny) 91
I was so distraught after reading that summary that my co-workers had to put me in a mental rehab facility. They now have me posting here to tell you this so I can overcome my fears and once again enter society as a normal person.
Submission + - Valve engineers weed out bad 'lying' game servers (teamfortress.com) 1
billlava writes: "Tired of Team Fortress 2 servers that lie in order to attract players, engineers at Valve (creators of the Half Life franchise) have come up with a way to weed out servers that give false information about the number of players online, or custom server options.
After kicking around some proposals, we came up with a simple system built around the theory that player time on a server is a useful metric for how happy the player is with that server. It's game rules agnostic, and we can measure it on our steam backend entirely from steam client data, so servers can't interfere with it. We already had this data for all the TF2 servers in the world, allowing us to try several different scoring formulas out before settling on this simple one that successfully identified good & bad servers...
Of course, this only works with their games running on Steam."
Submission + - AdSense Users Asked to Update Their Privacy Policy (circleid.com)
Netzer writes: CircleID has a post by Dhaval Doshi mentioning that he received an email from Google AdSense asking publishers to change their websites' privacy policy in preparation for Google's new interest-based advertising. According to Google, 'Interest-based advertising enables advertisers to reach users based on their interests (e.g. 'sports enthusiasts'), and allows them to show ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser websites.' In order to do this, Google requires to place a cookie in the computer of the user and Google AdSense now requires publishers to change their website's privacy policy accordingly.
Submission + - Argument About Streaming to be Streamed (blogspot.com)
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "You may recall that in an RIAA case, SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, the district court ruled that an oral argument about the constitutionality of statutory damages could be streamed, and the RIAA has been fighting that with a petition for 'mandamus or prohibition' in the appeals court, which is opposed by the press. Interestingly, it now turns out that the appeals court's oral argument about the streaming will itself be recorded and then streamed. It is hard to imagine how a court which routinely streams its own oral arguments can rule that it is somehow inappropriate for similar oral arguments in the district court to be streamed as well."
Comment Real Cost? (Score 2, Insightful) 410
Is that the real cost of sending a text msg or just the average rate charged per msg? One has got to think its cheaper for phone companies to send a text msg then it is to make a phone call, but I don't know.
