It's true that Blizzard doesn't want you selling your characters, but it happens nonetheless. This was especially true around the time he's talking about, before Battle.net accounts were a thing and it was fairly simple to merge WoW accounts, but it's still possible today. I have a friend who started playing in 2004 and he sold his account for about $4,000 right before starting college in mid-2006.

Well, there are two points to consider about this:

1) The ban was not permanent, but was only six months. This is a departure from their previous botting bans and will put expiration near the end of the year, which lines up with a potential patch / expansion release.

2) As others have mentioned, getting banned does not prevent you from creating a new account and buying the game again. That's an instant ~$70 for Blizzard, equivalent to a player subscribing for about 4.5 months.

3) Botting had gotten very bad in some places. A lot of customers were complaining about them turning a blind eye to it and they really needed to do something.

Finally, the primary botting software that was targeted was HonorBuddy which is mostly used for player-vs-player activities. Given how much people have complained about the current state of PvP it's not surprising they went after it in an attempt to improve things. As a bonus, the developer of HonorBuddy has said he will be discontinuing development of the software due to the ban wave.

This is a good plan. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plantlife. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. Selecting survivors need not be difficult -- a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills.

Naturally, they would breed prodigiously; there would be much time, and little to do. And, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, society could be rebuilt. Though since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Mein Fuhrer, we should start planning at once!

Battery? No, what we need are nukes, a subterranean (submarsean?) vehicle that can travel to the core to place them, and a team of misfit heroes.

Of course it was, and the group that organized the event didn't try to hide it. Of course, what you call "trolling" they call "exercising First Amendment freedoms". Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

So where do you draw the line? Unless you convert to Islam and sign up for one of their terror camps they'll always have some excuse to point at you and say "He's different! He should be killed!" I suggest reading about the paradox of intolerance. I particularly like Karl Popper's standpoint:

There is no "right to not be offended" in the US. Saying we should avoid "throwing fuel on the fire" doesn't address who started the fire in the first place, or how to put it out. No progress will be made by acquiescing to their demands and standing firmly against these kinds of ideas and the people that hold them is the only way to -- slowly -- eradicate them.

A one-armed armed gunman killed my wife!

And now they're taking a page out of the BSA's lawyer playbook with this "lost revenue" crap. Just because someone could have bought a $500 ticket from NY to SLC doesn't mean that $100 was stolen from United because they bought a $400 ticket that was NY to LA with a layover in SLC.

And then there's airline pricing in general. I always have a hard time feeling sorry for the airlines, but when the price of oil (the biggest expense for them) dropped like a rock end of last year, did the airlines lower ticket prices or remove fuel surcharges? Nope.

Big companies like airlines have used obscure and convoluted pricing schemes for decades as a way to screw over the average customer. Seeing them get thrown back into their faces isn't illegal -- it's a sweet dose of justice.

That's funny, since that's exactly what I did for Pandora. AdBlock Plus makes Pandora pretty much ad-free, but when I started using it more I decided that I wanted to support companies which offer a way to pay for their service aside from advertising (which I find completely unacceptable and have no compunctions blocking). Pandora isn't the only company whose service I pay for, but it's surprisingly hard to find companies who offer a reasonably priced subscription model. Many expect you to shell out 50x as much money as they'd make off you via advertising, and even more completely ignore that for an ad-blocking user, their gain via conversion to a subscriber is 100%.

Ad blockers are simply a form a civil disobedience against the corporate marketing and advertising asshats who are trying to redefine and take over the Internet. It isn't illegal and isn't immoral. The fact that it improves the online experience (your "free lunch") is just a nice side effect.

I have no idea where that came from, but it sure rolled off the keyboard easily enough. I'd actually intended to mention the PaleMoon fork of Firefox.

I think they probably do. At least, that's the reason I've always felt explained the Chromification of Firefox. That dumbing-down and relative takeover of the project direction by "UX designers" and "social media engineers" was allowed because the powers at the top felt that it was the only way they could try and recover some of the userbase lost to Chrome.

What they don't realize is that Firefox was created to "take back the web" from the stagnating Internet Explorer 6. It was never about replacing IE as some overbearing dominant beast.

And Firefox succeeded! Development on IE was revitalized by Microsoft, Google released Chrome, and work was renewed on web standards (a whole 'nuther can of worms there, but a separate topic). How did Firefox accomplish this? By being fast, lean, developer-friendly, power-user friendly, absurdly extensible, and with simple and clear design goals.

If Mozilla had simply stuck to these principles, Firefox user share would still have gone down -- it was a certainty due to the additional options for reasonable browsers, mobile usage, Google bundling Chrome with everything they can get their hands on, etc. However, I think it would have gone down less, and maybe even a lot less if they'd remained the browser they were rather than turning into the little puppy following Chrome around.

People who left Firefox for Chrome because they liked Chrome's design better would still have left. But with ChromiFox, people who don't like Chrome are leaving too, because if you're stuck with either Chrome or Chrome Light, you may as well go for the real deal. Sure, there are projects like Ice Weasel and LucidFox which attempt to bring some of that back, but they're relatively niche and don't have the visibility or word-of-mouth needed to take off.

In short: Mozilla abandoned their primary design goals and principles, the same ones that made Firefox great, and the result is user loss, stagnation and, probably, eventual obscurity. As someone who used Firebird, this make me very sad.

The downside is that it doesn't appear to support block-level file changes -- you can only create or overwrite an entire file at once. This means that storing something like a 50GB TrueCrypt volume isn't really feasible and you'd have to encrypt all your files individually. This is more difficult and more prone to mistakes.

Hopefully they expand the API at some point to allow binary delta updates of some kind, but their omission could have been a conscious decision to try and discourage people from storing huge files and big encrypted containers.

Damage Per Second. It's a unit of measure in games such as WoW that's primarily used to show how much better you are than other players. Typical use of the term would be, "hey, does anyone have dps meter for that last pull?" Feigning insecurity and disinterest are important, and the requester must absolutely not reveal that they're running 2 or 3 meter addons themselves.

A new mouse, preferably one with at least 12 programmable buttons, variable weights, and at least two bright blue LEDs, is sure to increase your DPS by at least 20%.