Blog posts tagged "rant" – Posts 1..5 of 8 posts found:

Just recently, MPAA/RIAA sock puppets Brein managed to convince some clueless judge to order two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands, XS4ALL and Ziggo to block (in)famous torrent website The Pirate Bay. TPB have put up a message that is shown to anyone visiting from a Dutch IP address, as shown below. XSALL and Ziggo have both announced they will appeal to a higher court, which is a good thing. I don't even use TPB myself and wouldn't really miss it, but I do care deeply about worthless assholes doing anything limiting my internet access. So, how would this work and what can I (or anyone) do to give these lying thieves the finger and circumvent these blocks if they are upheld by the higher courts?

You may have seen the latest well-publicised PayPal horror story. I've seen plenty of them too and was never really bothered about them, figuring those people might have brought it on themselves. Well, not anymore. Now that I have my own experience to add to the list, I'm done defending PayPal and have actually closed my account. PayPal not only inconvenienced me in several ways, but their communication actually contained blatant lies, not to mention the whole thing being drenched in incompetence. I have zero tolerance for that kind of crap from any company that has anything to do with my finances. Here's what happened.

Web development is something I've been doing for the past 15 years, and it's been my day job for the past 8 years. I've also done quite a lot of server administration tasks since then, even if that wasn't part of my actual job description. While there's probably a good economic case for outsourcing hosting and support duties, it can get to be quite frustrating when things simply don't work as intended. This is even more the case when you're a more technically savvy user (and I count myself among those, even if I'm no guru) and you have to deal with a poor hapless tech. You know what it is needs to be done and they just don't seem to be able to do it.

I quite enjoy a good movie, so I frequently visit the cinema. Very often, I also buy the DVD for the movies that I liked in the movie theater, as well as season boxed sets of episodes of TV-series. Even though downloading such material is technically legal in this country (as long as you don't upload or otherwise share it), I prefer to own the real thing. With more than a thousand DVDs bought, you'd think the studios would love me. Unfortunately, they don't. They treat their loyal customers like thieves. I'm talking about DRM, of course, and how it makes life difficult only for the honest users without impeding pirates in any significant way.

There are some online games that I enjoy playing. What many of those appear to have in common nowadays is that there are profanity filters in them. Personally I think that is a monumentally stupid idea. There are two reasons for that. The first is that it is a very ineffective and hypocritical form of censorship. I've never understood why people, especially Americans, (at least in public) condemn the use of certain simple words and go positively ballistic at the sight of even mild nudity, yet live in a society that glorifies violence to the point where the "right to bear arms" is a part of the country's constitution and many people make use of that right. I can sort of understand that parents don't want their kids to be bombarded with expletives, but can those same parents honestly say that they never swear themselves? I doubt it very much. Many are indeed terrible hypocrits and say they "won't swear in front of the children". As if no child hearing a curse suddenly makes it better. The parents learnt those words, the kids will too. Filtering them in a game isn't going to prevent that. If you really think swearing is that bad, then it won't do to keep your children ignorant, but you need to set the right example for them and explain to them what it is they shouldn't be doing and why they shouldn't be doing it.