Interesting Links for 26-06-2012
Jun. 26th, 2012 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Sonic.net: We Delete User Logs After Two Weeks. Your Internet Provider Should, Too.
- There is a third Dungeons and Dragons movie, so bad that even SyFy will not release it!
- Olympic park workers blacklisted over political views
- Facebook forces all users over to @facebook.com e-mail addresses
- Conservatives raise the spectre of food vouchers for the poor
- Five reasons why cutting housing support for young people is a bad move
- An ex-RBS batch person talks about their recent problems.
- EU unveils its vision for the future of monetary union.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 11:28 am (UTC)This was just so stupid. If they offered a free email account that delivered emails promptly, that could be used for any facebook friend, that could be very useful and I might well use it. I originally started using gmail solely as a back-end, but started giving that account out as a backup, etc. And if google hadn't jumped the shark on privacy, I might have switched permanently to gmail if my cantab address expired.
But no, facebook emails:
* Are not delivered to the recipient (since it's impossible to set facebook to reliably deliver email notifications of messages without it resetting them later)
* Are (presumably) horribly formatted as facebook messages
* I spend way more time trying to un-set facebook settings than getting any benefit from them.
So now my only opinion about facebook emails is that I want them to go away and die in a fire. And I'm rapidly running out of patience with facebook generally: I like it as a way of staying in touch with people, but eventually I will officially retire it. (I still hope for something that fulfils the same niche.)
no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 11:34 am (UTC)Youch. I can see the logic, but is there any evidence that this does any good whatsoever and/or not massive amounts of harm? I think America does this and it just seems to (a) massively increase the stigma and (b) create a giant beurocratic overhead. And (for us capitalists) it distorts the market depending what's included and what isn't. We were just talking about trying to get AWAY from this complication for VAT.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 12:42 pm (UTC)While that sounds like sense, the missing Step 2 in the underpants-gnome logic chain is that if you reduce benefits, it will increase the gap between wages and benefits. I bet it just reduces the wages, leaving the gap unchanged.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 02:46 pm (UTC)Which is why any sensible person would wait to see how well that worked before trying to redefine benefits _again_.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 03:08 pm (UTC)http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-18183511
says it's being phased in from April next year.
And here's a factsheet:
http://www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/welfare-reform/universal-credit/
no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 11:40 am (UTC)The EU is already investigating Facebook for a variety of privacy violations and has shown in the past with Microsoft that they have no problem fining companies huge amounts of money for violations (which Microsoft had the cash on hand to easily pay, but Facebook, not so much.)
By every available metric out there, Facebook ads don't work, which is why GM pulled their entire Facebook ad campaign and other companies will follow suit. (Facebook ads only seemed to make sense before there was data available on their effectiveness.)
Meanwhile any examination of Freindstr and MySpace shows that eventually people migrate to newer social networks, unless there is some really compelling reason not to. Yet, even with that looking pretty evident Facebook seems to be almost trying to create reasons for people to migrate once some other Harvard grad comes up with the next big thing.
This explains why Facebook stock is tanking, but it doesn't explain why Facebook isn't becoming really pro-active to stop generating negative feelings. I mean, if you have a business model that suddenly advertisers don't trust, that's not the time to alienate your base users.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 12:56 pm (UTC)I wonder how long it'll be before Facebook explodes? Or quietly dies as everyone finds something like it but better.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 02:15 pm (UTC)It was everything I wanted the first one to be. Still not something to take seriously, of course, but with some creative moments and a lot of hilarious ones and awesome special effects.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 12:38 am (UTC)What really pissed me off was the so-called unbeatable dungeon, which was right in the middle of the guy's throne room, with convenient observation slits in the side. Setting aside the age-old problem of how, exactly, deadly traps in dungeons are reset, anybody wishing to deactivate all the traps in the dungeon could merely have cooked up a few hundred cauldrons of custard and poured them through the slits, and thereby reduced the problem to that of food poisoning.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-29 03:17 pm (UTC)I love the idea of your custard solution, though I suspect there's no such thing as "merely" cooking up a few hundred cauldrons of custard. Where do you get that much custard/that many cauldrons without the enemy noticing? On the other hand, oh man I would've much more happy about paying to see that.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-29 03:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-29 09:57 pm (UTC)And why not? One wizard in a group I played with invented a spell called "Khelben's Magic Cookie", which summoned...a magic cookie. It had one of four effects when you ate it (rolled a d4, not all were good effects). And I can think of hundreds of situations where summoning magic custard would be more useful than summoning a magic missile, come to think of it.
Damn it, now I miss tabletop roleplaying, even though I wasn't very good at it. Phoo.
(please ignore previous comment from wrong account! Which was, appropriately enough, from an online roleplaying account. Whoops)
no subject
Date: 2012-06-29 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-29 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 05:52 pm (UTC)(If you have any commentary on improving it, other than "You're talking nonsense." I'd appreciate it.)
no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 06:16 pm (UTC)So, they're building this new sword-fighting game that is based exclusively around the concept that controlling your sword-fighting with a controller or keyboard is rubbish. And then they offer, at the $25 level, the game with no motion controller. To me, that's just stupid; if your game's naff without a motion controller, you should have a pledge level that includes the game with a motion controller.
Given that part of the project is the development of a motion controller, it actually genuinely worries me that we don't see any real footage of that. There is neither a pledge level that includes the motion controller that they claim to be interested in manufacturing, nor is there an ETA on when they're going to have that ready. If they hadn't done such awesome videos I'd almost be tempted to say that this was a hoax.
There's no discussion of what platforms are going to be supported beyond the PC, which also surprises me – especially given that I think of motion control as being primarily the purview of the console. I haven't heard much about motion controls on the PC and I don't think I know a single person who has that functionality. Xbox, PS3 and Wii U all have high profile motion controllers. Why choose the platform that has the least motion control penetration when developing a motion-based game?