Thomas Jackson / Getty ImagesWatching faceless online passerby troll bloggers or mock fellow scribblers can be a drag, but what if legislators’ answer to online ne’er-do-wells was to ban anonymous comments from websites entirely? That’s what the state of New York is planning to do in identical bills — S.6779 and A.8688 – proposed by the New York State Assembly that would “amend the civil rights law” in order to “[protect] a person’s right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting.” The bill would require a web administrator to “upon request remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his ... Continue reading →
For the first 20 levels or so, Diablo III is like skiing down a gently sloping hill, one you’d label whatever comes before “green” at an actual resort. You can pretty well wade into any combat situation and wander back out by spamming a handful of buttons, playing to your character’s basic strengths (ranged or melee). If you die, which you probably won’t, your equipment takes damage and you re-spawn nearby. The most I’ve paid is a little over 100 gold pieces to have the guy back in town patch my stuff up. I’m carrying over 50,000 gold around in my “rare” leather pants, money that’s pretty much intravenously tapped to my character’s bank account. I’m like Warren Buffett in The Canterbury Tales with super ... Continue reading →
Surprise, Diablo III sold to the moon and back since its release last week on Tuesday, May 15, says developer/publisher Blizzard in so many words. In fact the company says more than 3.5 million people picked up a copy of its action-roleplaying trilogy closer during the game’s first 24 hours on sale, which would make it the fastest selling PC game of all time (based on Blizzard’s internal sales data and reports from “key distribution partners”). What’s more, Blizzard says the 3.5 million figure doesn’t include over 1.2 million additional players who received a copy of Diablo III in trade for signing up to play World of Warcraft for a year. Add the two figures together and you get 4.7 million global Diablo III players ... Continue reading →
When I woke this morning to find a funky-looking 24-key Moog synthesizer staring at me from just above Google’s homepage search box, I knew exactly what I’d be writing about. I’ve played the piano since I was four, growing up in the 1970s noodling with funky-sounding analog synthesizers stacked around my house. Robert Moog (his last name actually rhymes with “vogue”) is for me one of those guys every synthesizer wonk knows about. His last name is synonymous with electronic synthesis technology, doubling as an adjective you might use to describe a “fat” synthesizer sound. If you flip over to Google’s search page, you’ll see what I’m talking about: a fully functional Minimoog-like synthesizer (Moog’s earliest versions, as large as church organs, would have overwhelmed ... Continue reading →
