It is not the publisher's responsibility to police their users' play time. It is the user's responsibility to police their own play time and exercise time management skills as appropriate. Plenty of people claim (or are) addicted to porn, but no one is expecting the porn industry to step in and police their consumers. Instead, porn consumers are expected to be responsible for themselves - and rightly so. You erroneously believe the responsibility lies with someone other than the consumer simply because we live in a world that coddles people and makes it acceptable to shift the blame to someone else. Hell, even drug dealers are not expected to pony up for their buyers' rehab stints - and those are things that provably cause addiction!

How is the publisher to determine which of its players are addicted? Just because he spent nearly half his time playing in those 5 years does not necessarily mean that he was addicted to it. There are plenty of people who play to what could be considered excess by many people, but are not addicted. Personally, I played EverQuest excessively but I wasn't addicted and was able to quit. I was also able to choose NOT to play in order to go to work, keep my house clean, buy groceries, and engage in all the other mundane activities required to keep my life running smoothly.

For those interested, there are 1826 days in 5 years (one will be a leap year, so 5*365+1), which equates to 43824 hours. So, 20000 hours is 2.28 years. Assuming he worked for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, he spent 10448 hours at work. This leaves him an average of 7 hours, 20 minutes "free" per day. Clearly, most of this would have been consumed by sleeping, but all of this still does not mean he was addicted.

How is this at all "News for nerds" OR "Stuff that matters"?

You know, for a short time I ran ads on a feline-related site I am responsible for and kept waiting for the ads to be relevant to the content of the site. Three months in, they still were not relevant. So, I dumped all the ads and just kept the Google searchbox. If they can't even make the ads relevant to the content of the site, then why should I subject my visitors to the ads and why should I muck up the look of the site by displaying ads?

That is not at all what he said or implied. If I had mod points, I'd have modded you troll

I don't really know what the limit is for catastrophic blowout. I do know that I have inadvertently inflated them to double (60 psi) and driven on them. So, with that knowledge, I figured I'd be pretty safe at 40 psi. This is something I'd like to learn more about, but haven't taken the time to find more information on it, yet.

I don't think it is a crappy trade-off, at all. If you drive defensively to start, then you shouldn't end up in too many situations where the lower friction will compromise you. Of course, this means you have to stop running yellow lights when you could otherwise reasonably have stopped. It also means you have to stop driving your car/truck/SUV as though it were a Formula 1 race car. I think it probably also means you need to pay more attention to what is going on around you and not talk on the phone and such, either. I have permanently over-inflated my tires by 10 psi because I get an extra 3 to 4 miles per gallon. I found that being mindful of the fact there is a smaller area of the tire in contact with the road has modified my driving behaviour and I am more cautious than I was before. The trade-off is entirely worth it in my opinion and experience.

I received a couple of letters from these people for www.tabaxipixiebob.com last year. I dismissed them out of hand simply because I am sufficiently happy with the current host-and-registrar. However, if I had been interested in making I change, I would have considered these people. Fortunately, I would have done research about the company first, which is what would have saved me from a very expensive mistake.
Granted, 1and1 isn't a great host (and I've got my eye on a new host/registrar), but there haven't been any service outages and the services supplied by 1and1 meet the site's meager needs.

I have. 18$ for a Men's size 11 1/2. I've owned them one month and they are already falling apart. If I could have afforded 80$ or 100$ on shoes, I'd have spent it as I knew in advance the quality to expect from Wal-Mart. Worst 18$ I have ever spent when viewed from a quality-of-product standpoint. From a keeps-my-feet-covered standpoint, I could have done worse, I suppose.

I actually did exactly that about 5 years ago. A neighbor in the apartment building I was living in had an unsecured wireless network. So, I took the time to type up instructions on how to secure their wireless network and saved the text file to their hard drive. The only difference is that I didn't have to "hack" their computer to do this. All I had to do was switch my workgroup to the Windows default WORKGROUP and I could upload files to, and download files from, their computer. Really, in most cases there shouldn't be any "hacking" required. After all, if they are unsophisticated enough to not secure their wireless network, then their computer is not going to be any harder a target.

My neighbor never did secure their network. So, I can only guess they never found the text file.

I don't see where Tynt is claiming that visitors to sites that use Tynt are their customers. The same thing is true of Google Analytics. These services exist for the site owners, not the visitors to those sites. Anyone who believes a site's visitors are the customers these services are targeting is simply deluding themselves in their arrogance and self-importance.

Why should I write this tool myself? I can sign up for Tynt (and did some time ago) and use a tool that has already been written. The same thing can be said of Google Analytics. Given enough time, knowledge, and incentive, I am sure I could write a similar tool myself. Again, why should I? Someone else has already written it and it does what I need it to do. Since you're such an advocate of writing your own software tools, then I would expect that you've written your own operating system/browser/whatever entirely from scratch. No? Certainly, anyone using an operating system/browser/whatever could have written it themselves instead of giving money to a third party.

Furthermore, I very much doubt that *anyone* who uses Tynt on their site could have written it themselves. I've seen it in use on smaller websites created and maintained by people who are clearly not programmers, but they are able to follow directions on copying and pasting some pre-written code into their site.

Since Google Analytics is also building a massive database of viewer data, then I assume you'll be happy to rant against that, as well?

I don't view you as corrupting their service. Instead, you are providing exactly the kind of information that I'm looking for as someone who uses Tynt. I doubt your highlighting is exactly random, as you are reading the text you've highlighted at some point. If you're repeatedly selecting text, then that tells me you are lingering in that area of the content, which means that either I need to improve it and make it more clear or you find that information particularly interesting. The tricky part is determining whether you are particularly interested in the content or if word choice+sentence structure+order of information presented+etc is impairing comprehension.

Of course it's a feature for site owners. The whole service is a service for site owners. Why does this confuse/surprise you?

I use Tynt's service on a cattery website for which I am responsible (www.tabaxipixiebob.com). The primary reason I use Tynt's service is for the attribution link because I need to know if another Pixie Bob breeder copies the site owner's content and uses it on their site. This has happened to at least one other breeder that I know of, where that person's personal information (information about their employment, the name of their spouse, etc) was copied and used verbatim. So, if something like this happens, then I need to be able to contact that breeder and negotiate a change to the content of their site. The attribution service also can help generate backlinks to the site, assisting with search rankings and such.

The other reason I use it is because I want to be able to improve the content on the site. So, if I know what content is being highlighted while being read, then I know what parts of a page are generating interest. A heat map, of sorts, and content that is not highlighted as often probably needs improvement. I view this aspect of Tynt as no different than a writer or movie producer lurking in forums where their work is being discussed to find out what parts are most interesting and what is most criticized/lampooned. I'll grant that I am not *asking* visitors whether they want to share this data, but at the same time, it isn't like I can exactly have a conversation with even a small fraction of the people who visit the site since I have no idea who they are or how to contact them. If I could round up a focus group and get some feedback, then I wouldn't need to use Tynt for this (but I would still use it for the attribution part of the service).

Hope this helps to demystify the use of Tynt a little for you.