A Parallax View

End of LAN

I think that This Here is someBullshit:

We don’t currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we’re encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We’re looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future.

And (Poorly translated)

We want to encourage players in Battle.net to play. In Diablo 2 was the first option single player, you click it, playing the game in normal difficulty, and thinks: “Hey, I would now prefer to play with my friends.”, But could not, because if you look at the Battle . net connected, one could not take the character.We could not allow that, because we were the safety of characters not guarantee offline. There is still a separation between single player and Battle.net characters. We want all to know that it is better to play Battle.net. You can play with other players and if they want it they can close off their game alone games. If you decide it should, offline to play, then we will also be the player know that he is not in a position to be the character to play online. We currently have no intentions to LAN games, we focus fully on the Battle.net, where we not only have the ability to quickly contact with other players record, but also to Blizzard community and thus also to support , As in the community.

WTF!?

Global Gaming Factory Acquires The Pirate Bay:

In what you can certainly call a surprise move, The Pirate Bay has been sold. Global Gaming Factory has announced that is has purchased the torrent search engine for 60 million Swedish Krona (7.8 million USD). They plan to build a business model around The Pirate Bay where content providers and copyright owners get compensatation.

Welp, looks like it is time to go to a new Torrent site.

Turtle

I saw a turtle today on my walk to work. It is the first time I have every actually seen a wild turtle, which shouldn’t be too surprising what with the whole growing up in a desert thing. I took some time to watch it move along on its turtle business, it was neat!

Start Reading Matt Taibbi

Fareed Zakaria’s Manifesto:

In one exchange in that piece Zakaria talks with an elderly Arab intellectual who scoffs at Zakaria’s suggestion that Arab cities should try to be more like globalization-friendly capitals like Singapore, Seoul and Hong Kong. The old Arab protests that those cities are just cheap imitations of Houston and Dallas, and what great and ancient civilization would want that?

I thought the old Arab’s comment was funny, but Zakaria imbued it with serious significance. “This disillusionment with the West,” he wrote, “is at the heart of the Arab problem.” And while witty Arab potshots at tacky southern strip-mall meccas like Houston were significant enough to put high up in Newsweek’s seminal piece about the root causes of 9/11, things like America’s habitual toppling of sovereign Arab governments and installation of ruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran were left out more or less entirely (Zakaria managed to write a whole section on the Iranian revolution without even mentioning that the Shah come to power thanks to a CIA-backed overthrow of democratically-elected Mohammed Mosaddeq, whose crime was ejecting Western oil companies from Iran).

And:

Because if you get into the actual gory details of what went on in those years, there’s just no way you come out of that story not wanting to see every banker on Wall Street strung up by his testicles. The crimes of this era were monstrous thieveries, committed against ordinary people in a highly systematic and organized fashion with the aid and compliance of a bought-off government, and the only way you can not perceive what happened as a profound indictment of capitalism is if you blow off the specifics entirely and try to hide the details in vague, airy words like “irresponsibility” and “excesses.”

Because the specifics matter. It’s one thing to say that Citi wasted some of the money taxpayers sent its way via the bailout; it’s another thing to say Citi wasted some of the taxpayers’ money by upholstering the pillows on the private jet Sandy Weill took to Mexico over Christmas vacation with Hermes scarves. It’s one thing to say Wall Street bankers felt pressure to chase profits; it’s another thing to say they achieved those profits by systematically robbing a whole generation of pensioners and working-class homeowners, under the noses of the politicians they bought with tens of millions in campaign contributions.

Justification