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Comment Re:Bullying (Score 1) 183

Right becouse everyone why work for lesser evil? and Google obviously took the lead. Microsoft at least made their own products to compete with open source, and at one point they were really good. Google just takes from Open Source, closes it, tivoizes, locks bootloaders and makes it dependent on closed source drivers.

Comment Re:Needs a language preference (Score 1) 183

Yea I don't mind, i understand people with poor or next-to-no english wanna play also. and there are command systems that help allivate issue a little. But still someotimes someone does something wrong and there's even no way to explain to him what he does wrong, leaving lots of people frustrated.

Comment Re:compared to forums (Score 2) 183

I talked with her a lot about this and she mentioned that while coleration between good users and good moderators is quite high, there's large number of users who she calls "cryptohaters" and i call hypocrits, in public the'll advocate peace and understanding, but given anonymous medium liek down/up votes, or power (liek mod rights), will hate, downwote, silence their oponents with post removals etc. That's why I think separate "trust" metric makes sense.

Comment Re:Bullying (Score 5, Interesting) 183

I'd like to extend above answer a little. The systems in games like Smite and Lol actually got so good that amount of false negatives are so low that they are almost non-existent and can be handled throughly on case-by-case basis. I play Smite a lot in my free time, and I see how the system works from outside, I cannot count how many times I was thretened to be reported, and even if half of these threats were followed through I probably earened over 100 "Intentional feeding" reports by now, and I'm still playing without even one temporary ban. At the same time I've seen number of players disapear from leaderboard after I've reported them for harrasment (there was actuall harrasment, mother calling, death threats even), it didn't happen after my report, but few days later after few more matches all of haters sooner or later got permaban.

So the reputation systems came a long long way from where they used to be, false positives are no longer big problem, the biggest issue is now reaction time (time between player starting spewin vitriol to the moment he's prevented from playing), ideally it should not be few days (as it's now in most cases), someone having bad day shouldn't mean a bad day to all person he's teamed up with

One of the solutions might be "incremental" baning, by disabling some of the futures - which some games already do (and Microsoft is doing in this case). One of better examples is voice chat muting, I cannot recall which game id doing it. They way it works is the more people mute asshole, the more likelly he is to start muted in first place, his teammates might decide to unmute him, but there's no longer risk of "Beter not fuck up morons i need this win" welcoming you to the match.

I'm looking forward to further advancements in these systems, as playing team games on internet is still quite annoying these days, especially since you often get matched with people who don't speak english and/or you cannot just smack for beeing an idiot like you'd if you played football together.

Comment Re:Bullying (Score 5, Interesting) 183

I see this point brought up every time I discuss the reputation system. There's quite a bit of game theory behind it but it can be done. And actually there are systems that implement it (LoL for example, Stack Overflow, Quora - in non-gaming world).

When creating these systems you don't simply ban someone after one or few reports. The way most of them work are: Calculate a trust in player reporting T. New players have this set very low, later the more acurate reports were the higher the trust, addintionally usually the more reports user sends the less they "weight" (this basically makes assholes who report for "feeding" everyone with negative k/d ratio meaningless and is a reason i was never banned ;))
Once the number of reports * trust outweight player karma (which he usually collects by small amount for each game where he's not reported, and for each accurate report he makes), then he gets banned.
That's a bit simplified and in reality you build a neural network with feedback (that's how most of these systems are implemented), initially you hire people to "teach" a network, eliminate initial threat, and build "trust" on group of players. After you have big enough group of trusted players, they themselves are used to further train the network and detect new usefull players and ban bad ones. A lot depends on the initial training phase, but I've personally seen one Community Manager turn her community into self-moderating machine, after a year she didn't even had to do much banning herself, each message that didn't conform to standards was almost immidietly met with polite response that explained why it's inapropriate and request not to continue the topic! By users tehmselves!
So yes, these systems do work (At least good ones), and no reports do not become your personal moderation/harrasment tool, smart people already thought of that

Comment Re:Have they fixed the need to manually rebalance? (Score 2) 91

This is actually a horrible flaw in my opinion. I've also installed btrfs on one of my laptop drives and it was a horrible mistake. If you run out of space it's possible in some edge cases that you won't be able to free your space!
You'd expect `rm huge_file` to work, but no it won't. Some pages recomend echo "">huge_file but that not always help either if the reason the disk got full is metadata
I honestly cannot understand how anyone can create filesystem that A) lies about free disk space B) Does not allow you to free up space when it's full.

Submission + - How about a Megatons to Megawatts program for US nuclear weapons? (thebulletin.org)

Lasrick writes: Dawn Stover looks at the incredibly successful Megatons to Megawatts program, which turned dismantled Russian nuclear warheads into lower-grade uranium fuel that can be used to produce electricity. The 1993 agreement between the US and Russia not only eliminated 500 tons of weapons-grade uranium, but generated nearly 10% of US electricity consumption. The Megatons to Megawatts program ended in December, but Stover points out that the US has plenty of surplus nuclear weapons that could keep the program going, without the added risk of shipping it over such huge distances. A domestic Megatons to Megawatts, if you will. This would be very cost effective and have the added benefit of keeping USEC, the only American company in the uranium enrichment field, in business.

Comment Re:They should THANK Nasdaq (Score 3, Informative) 91

It's called underwriting - when stock goes public, it usually has one or more major banks as underwriters which are required to keep stock at certain price (not neceserilly a IPO price, limit can be lower). Company can go public without it, but most big IPOs have that option.
It's a system designed to avoid "flops" and for more realistic IPO prices. If underwriter values stock to high they have to spend money buying that stock.
Usually there's time and/or a value limit (so we'll prop up price fo x days, or we'll spend Y$ to keep it above Z$)

Comment Printing a gun is a crime.... (Score 0, Flamebait) 717

... and buing it completelly legally for your kid is absolutelly alright. Welcome to America! Where only thing standing between you and realiable rifle is 7 day waiting period. At the same time God forbid you fail at making science expiriment - even if you're 15 year old girl - you'll be charged as an adult terrorist! Thank God I'm not living there

Comment Re:Open Source License (Score 1) 630

For me the only real problem with GPL is freedom to copy and redistribute.
Only certain companies that do trully properietary stuff would mind open sourcing their software for end clients, there's no downside for them with that.
The serious problem for small companies is that releasing software under GPL means you'll only get one client, or several ones. Then one of them will publish software on github and/or sourceforge, and that's it. That's the end of your revenue for software, there are other revenue sources of course, but I'm focusing on software here.

So there most obvious option - to simply build software - invest 10000$ in it, and sell to 1000 clients for $10, is out of window. Becouse first one, or 20th one will publish it for free, and that'll be last sell you make.
That leaves you two options:
- you are forced to work for large corporations - who'll buy your GPL work and use it internally with no intention to redistribute, so your code is as good as closed source.
- You publish shity code and charge for consulting/books/documentation. This is of course asshole option that most of "successful" GPL projects take. They make software so complicated, so hard to use, and so hard to modify, that you HAVE to pay for consulting and/or modifications becouse there's no fucking way you'll be able to modify it yourself. So again, might as well be closed source - at least closed source software used to have good documentation.

Either way becouse of GPL you definitelly cannot make a living by creating software unless you're asshole.
I'm not saying MIT/BSD is better in that regard, BUT, since it can be used in commercial software, you can publish your changes on less permisive licence(don't allow copyleft) but still publish source code, and contribute patches. Also since that software will be actually used in comercial settings there's higher chance that someone who is professional programmer will create fixes and/or introduce features.

Comment Re:Blizzard did the same BS in Diablo 3 (Score 1) 303

And it took you so long to figure it out?

Wake up people. This is happening becouse we let them. You could've read sane reviews on net that pointed it out. And guess what - not buy a game!

I spent 200 PLN on Starcraft I when I was 16y old kid - it was almost 1/4th of my mothers salary. I mowned lawns 2 months for it.
But guess what - you could set up lan party and run that one copy on all 4 computers as long as CD was in one of drives - completely legally!
Me and my friends spent whole summer playing this thing day and night. Friend got hooked up on Diablo2 - played it for months on BN in Hardcore mode.
No Blizzard is selling 1/3th of Starcraft2 for 250PLN and I simply refuse to pay for it. A) It's fucking 1/3th of game! B) You cannot even set up lanparty without internet access. Diable III ? Don't get me started on this shit. Pure grinder, patches that destroy gameplay. Rampart inflation. Full of bugs.

why the fuck would ANYBODY buy this shit?
Yet you do. I don't. but YOU do. And this is becouse YOU that we get this shit. Becouse idiots like you that spend money on game before thinking, then come here to vent on how you spent $$$ and realized Blizzard only wants your money. Guess what You've already been screwed. Blizzard does not care.

Next time just don't buy something just becouse it says Blizzard on cover. Read reviews and refuse to buy anything that has microctransactions in it. And refuse to pay for anything that's single player with always online DRM. You'll make word better place.

Comment Re:Chicken Littles (Score 1) 586

Yes becouse it's not like damn crows or parots can talk and comunicate in English. It's not like Chimpanze can learn sign language. It's not like they can read books eaither. It's not like animals can use medicine. It's not like the can use tools! Most of animals have ability to learn too. So maybe common man is not a dumb animal. We're in fact very smart animals. But there's really nothing separating us from animals.

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