I should mention that this is not optional in that you can not participate in the forum community unless you accept your real name being displayed to everyone. The issue of the character name being "optional" is moot since that is what is most important in terms of game play.

This business with people's real names is optional as much as any other strong-arm, ultimatum-esque tactic is "optional". Thankfully fan sites will provide forums to get around this nonsense.

I also haven't yet found anything that explains what will happen to past posts. Will they suddenly appear under real names?

Yeah, that's pretty much what's going to happen. It's just one more thing for them to be paranoid about.

The woman who I used to hang out with back in EQ was very popular and had many stalkers. That was partially her fault, of course, but we had to run up walls, break clipping on some objects and do other crazy shenanigans just to get around the creepers. One guy who found us actually threatened me while she was away and then upon her return tried to tell her that *I* was saying threats and being the freak! "Creeper" is a very good term for these types.

She showed me a few times what happened when she removed /anon by telling me which names to watch out for. It was creepy to watch so I can imagine what it's like to be the focus of that kind of... attention. We both promptly went /anon after that and ported back to our bind spots.

To say "it's optional!" in this case is nuts. The information on this page: http://us.battle.net/realid/?rhtml=y is particularly disturbing.

My guess is that you don't have a Facebook account or you rarely use it, because the issue of Facebook goes well beyond "crack" or such.

A.) Everybody at your university has Facebook.

B.) You need to communicate with a group, and by "communicate", I mean time, date, activities, who is doing what in those activities, what is required for those activities (eg; clothing? tools?), everyone's office hours, and a plethora of other information.

C.) Everybody has very random schedules, and at least a few live 30 minutes out of town

Anybody who even dares to suggest email for this is utterly clueless. Also, anyone who suggests that "everyone just use this-other-system instead" has clearly never tried to get a large group of every day people (particularly college students, none of which are technology majors of any sort), who are in turn tied to other people who are tied to the system who are tied to other people, to begin using something new.

Additionally you have the international students who are nearly impossible to keep in contact with, especially through any other means. Typically they'll have their own system (eg; Cyworld), but those systems will require a national identification number that only citizens of that country have. Therefore you can not join those systems and thus you use Facebook.

Lastly, the friends who you have, and who all have random schedules due to classes that take place all over the day-by-day calendar in addition to jobs, sports, and other activities all have Facebook. Ergo you all continue to use Facebook. Again, just try to get these people - who know people other than you who are all similarly tied to Facebook - to use anything other than Facebook.

If someone still can't understand all of the above and STILL says "will I don't see why you don't just close your FB account & use this-whatever instead" then that someone has clearly never socialized and they probably should not comment on a subject which they have less than zero understanding of.

It's not about YOU, it's about EVERYONE, and that's why you can check in but you can never leave.

My thoughts exactly. This fella doesn't deserve to be arrested considering that he didn't do anything with the account. Seeing as their system is so easy to crack they should be thankful that this was brought to light rather than abused.

Sure it's a 'round about way to do it, but a slap on the wrist is quite enough IMO.

a.) Long time gamer here. Been gaming since the Atari 2600.
b.) Psychology major. Undergrad. 3.7x GPA if, for some odd reason, that matters to anyone who's reading.

I'm going to be blunt and say that studies such as this one are biased. I've considered doing research in this area myself to counter this sort of nonsense.

Personally I am of the opinion that a major part of the bias comes from the isolated nature of these studies. For example, one need only to watch my brother as he watches sports in order to draw the conclusion that watching sports increases violent thoughts and/or behavior. That's not because he attacks anyone - just as any well adjusted person who's playing a game isn't going to attack someone - but because his behavior (and dare I suggest some of his thoughts) is pretty obvious. He yells at the screen, he jumps up in anger, he clenches his fists, his face turns red.. yeah, he's a major sports fan.

Does this mean that sports increases violent behavior? Sure it does. Does that actually mean anything? No, of course not. To suggest that watching sports makes him violent is to play a game of semantics. It's technically correct, but to generalize that in any way is rather stretching it. This kind of behavior is perfectly normal (maybe really strange to some of us, but perfectly normal). This does not in any way mean that my brother is going to attack someone, or go out and shoot a fan of the opposing team.

As far as that's concerned, we have plenty of examples of sports fans causing public damage or attacking other people. It happens, just as it happens with people who play video games, or watches movies, or yodels, or whatever.

I'm not saying that this is done deliberately for the sake of an agenda, though that may be true in some cases. This meta study, however, is flawed, as any number of other posters here have noticed and mentioned.

This sort of nonsense is disheartening for me to see. This clearly isn't good science, and calling it any form of "definitive" is just arrogant and ignorant.

Done venting. Thanks for reading. I'm pretty tired so I'm not sure if this made as much sense as I kinda hope that it does.

^ This. Perhaps some people here are lucky enough to know people who are willing to use encryption tools. They don't live in the same world as the rest of us. "It ain't happening" isn't a strong enough way of expressing the situation. I was just barely able to convince someone to install an OTR plugin, and even then they grumble about it. That's just a plugin ffs. Imagine trying to convince people to use shared key encryption for their email. I've tried (I maintain a PGP key for some absurd reason) and the responses were "No" and "Hell no" and derivatives there of.

The closest I was able to get with email encryption was Ciphire Mail. That was a beautiful tool, and it was the easiest thing to ever happen to email encryption. It's a darn shame that they folded.

That is, of course, in regards to every day users. I can't speak for the enterprise level.

Agreed. I ordered the 5850 just last night. The bundled deal at Newegg comes with a free 600 watt Thermaltake power supply (limited time of course: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102857). I'll be gaming at 1920x1080, so this should be quite enough for me for a fair while (though I wish I could've justified a 2 GB card).

Normally I wouldn't do $300 for a vid card. I've paid the $600 premium in the past and that made me realize that the $150 - $200 cards do just fine. Last night's expenditure was to top out this system (card + 8 GBs RAM). Basically I'm betting on it lasting me (as a gaming machine) until DDR3 & related technologies drop to reasonable prices.

Perhaps by then nvidia will have a mid-to-low range version of this new toy that's worth buying.

Are we getting .blog yet? Actually that fad's kind of gone and Facebook is the new blog, so maybe .social . How long can these TLDs be?

It's not dead as long as people keep posting about it. Maybe people should LET IT DIE (emphasis added for emphasis) rather than continuing this ghost's existence. Not doing so is the only reason why this didn't fade away years ago, and it's the only reason why it's still being mentioned. It will never release. This is not your religion. You do not need to believe in this fantasy.

Perhaps I'm irritated more than I ought to be, but really, just let it die already. Please? I shall now go add the word Duke to FeedRinse and leave you good sirs & ma'ams (...?) to what I hope is a good day.

After the monumental amount of seriously obese people on OkCupid and other dating sites I seriously considered creating a dating site identical to this BeautifulPeople. While it's a shame that the idea has already been done (of course), it's good to see that the idea would have been a successful one.

Then there was the bait and switch that I had on OkCupid... some people have a very loose definition of "athletic". Anyway, I fully support the idea behind this particular dating website.

As of the time of this posting it's sleeting, and we face the prospect of 30+ MPH winds along with ~6 inches of snow.

On the subject of a battery back up system for a house I have to say, "Duh, I wish it would have been done sooner." It's a little unpleasant to think that my evening could be a long, cold night with howling winds and sleets of ice.

..but hey, maybe we'll get lucky.

Of course the safety of the batteries is a concern, but right now I just wish this would have been standard a long time ago. Heck, solar roofs and possibly wind power should have been standard a long time ago (reducing, not eliminating, the reliance on a public power system), but that's a whole other rant.

I kind of like the idea of having an avatar that's similar to me. Weight, muscle, general appearance, and how the world could affect the avatar are all interesting idea.

The patent also mentions pedometers and similar tools. Wii Fit was a start, but a system such as this one could encourage real-world exercising in order to see changes in your avatar and even to receive certain Achievements. Now those would be some achievements to show off. :) The game could theoretically guide the person toward a healthy amount of weight loss, which is monitored by the tools (eg; a Wii Fit board rip off, a pedometer, and so on). This is an ideal situation that assumes that no cheating is taking place.

I could see such a game asking about asthma (or the like), but it clearly goes too far when talking about pulling in medical records. There are some obvious reasons for considerable concern, but there is also some interesting potential here.

Right. Exactly. Personally I used to be anti-Ad Block Plus (I may have posted such a comment here quite a long time ago, actually). Even I broke down and got ABP eventually.

It's not that I didn't try, it's just that it became more and more laborious to individually block the offending ads. Obvious cycle is obvious, right? People use ad block, causing services turn to the irritating ads in some desperate act thus causing more people to begin using ad blockers. The problem is that ABP is a nuke, and I can't be arsed to go individually picking through them anymore.

On the bright side I've found that Element Hiding Helper is useful for blocking "features" of a website that aren't ads but that I find to be irritating or useless (I'm looking at you, Youtube).

Chrome is a fine browser in so far as performance (aside from that whole tracking thing). I'd use it - or more likely SRWare Iron - if it had ABP and X-Marks, and preferably some anti-tracking add-ons as well.

Ironkey is the first thing that came to mind as well. It has all of the tools that fill the requirements of the OP, and it has an automatic back up service.

The alternative is to do what I do, but it's not as user friendly. I have True Crypt on my USB stick along with, of course, a TC volume that contains all of the real data. In my case it's just a bunch of class work, but I suppose you could also put a small program in there that saves passwords. Granted, you would need to go through the trouble of starting TC, mounting the volume, and then loading your program that saves passwords. Frankly an Iron Key would be significantly more convenient as IIRC it has a password saving utility.

By the by, I keep my class work encrypted because I don't need to get nailed for "plagiarism" because some sod found my key and turned in my work (with their name on it) before I do. Improbable, but possible.