Ever since OWS started, something about the movement has bothered me.  I knew that I did not agree with what the people participating in it were saying, nor what they were doing, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.  Although I absolutely believe in people’s right to protest or demonstrate, I have thought since day 1 that it is not acceptable for people to pitch tents in public parks that expressly do not allow camping, or to so crowd into a public area as to prevent the rest of the public from using it.  However, I could not really articulate the real reasons behind my dislike of the OWS movement, until today.  Watching the news stories of the Occupiers crowding into the area of the New York Stock Exchange and purposely blocking streets to cut off access, I finally realized that what they are doing is the physical equivalent of an old-school Denial of Service attack.

A Denial of Service attack, or “DOS attack,” is a term that usually refers to a person or group trying to make an electronic or computer service unavailable to its users.  An example is the attack in 2000 by a teenager named “Mafiaboy” who was able to bring down the servers of Yahoo!, eBay, and many other big companies.  If you attack Yahoo! in a way that makes their service inaccessible to the people trying to use it, you are denying the users the Yahoo! service… hence the term “Denial of Service.”

One of the curious behavior patterns by those who commit DOS attacks is that they often claim to have some sort of honorable or noble motive.  Some claim they were “trying to show the vulnerabilities” in the system to “help” the company see the dangerous holes.  Sometimes, they will claim to be trying to “improve things,” as when a group of players purposely swarmed one zone in the online game EVE, deliberately trying to lag the server into rebooting — to protest some new game system that they didn’t like.  One way or another, DOS attackers frequently advance the defense that they made the attack “for the greater good.”

I have always viewed this justification as a poor excuse being put forward to defend atrocious, frankly indefensible behavior.  If you think Yahoo! is dangerously unprotected, tell them. Don’t attack them and ruin the web experience of thousands.  If you don’t like what EVE Online is doing in the game, cancel your subscription in protest.  Don’t prevent thousands of other players who don’t mind the changes from playing the new version of the game.  If these folks really wanted to help make things better, they’d help make them better — not make them worse.  After all, even Hitler claimed to be doing the horrible things he did “for the greater good” of Germany.  ”For the greater good” is just a fancy, less hackle-raising way of saying “the end justifies the means.”

And now back to Occupy Wall Street. The similarity of what they are doing to a Denial of Service attack is uncanny.  They swarm into public areas — areas meant to be used by tons of different people every day — take over, cram the area, and basically prevent anyone else from using it.  They stay there for weeks, then months, physically filling the area, and completely denying use of the park to anyone who has no political interest and is not a part of OWS.  This is, quite literally, a denial of service attack — they are denying park amenities to anyone but themselves.  When evicted (finally!) from the park, the OWS crowd moves to the NYSE, where they purposely block traffic and sidewalks, again deliberately attempting to physically deny use of the area by the “everyday” New Yorkers who are trying to do things like go to school, work, out on dates, and the like.  They are preventing regular city services and activities from being used by thousands of citizens — thus, denying service.  A clearer non-electronic case of a DOS attack, I cannot recall.

In addition to denying access to public areas, the OWS crowd uses the same excuses to justify their actions that hackers use after getting caught performing DOS attacks: “It’s for the grater good.” Although OWS members may not use those words specifically, this is what “We are the 99%” means.  Claiming to stand for 99% of the country, the OWS hooligans use their representation of the greater part of society (the “greater good”) to justify every disruptive and unacceptable tactic they employ.  Clearly, in their view, the end of achieving their goals justifies any means necessary… Including breaking city laws, physically assaulting law enforcement officials, and utterly trashing a public place that is used by far more than the “1%.”

This, then, is why I have had, all along, a visceral negative reaction to the OWS movement — because at its heart, it is quite literally a denial-of-service attack on public property.  Because I believe that DOS attacks are never justified for any reason — because I believe the end does not justify the means, and that certain means are unacceptable — I will never be able to get on board with the “Occupy” movement.  I can honestly say that I don’t know exactly what their goal is, what ends they wish to achieve, and beyond that I do not care.  No end is worthy of using the reprehensible means the OWS mob has employed to this point.  No end can ever justify a DOS attack against public resources.

The Occupy crowd may have a point buried beneath all the filth and slime of their dirty little encampments, but I refuse to hear it until they stop employing unacceptable methods.  The very first step has got to be an agreement that the end does not justify the means, and that there is no end on earth — none! — that can justify a denial-of-service attack against public institutions, property, or safety.  Until the Occupiers start behaving like responsible citizens instead of hooligans, I will not deign to even consider the issues they are pretending to raise.

Once in a while, a thread will disappear for reasons nobody can figure out.  I’ve seen cases where I and the other main participants have PMed each other, and asked why the heck the thread, which none of us thought contained rules violations or rude posts, was deleted or locked.  No explanation has been given so we are all at a loss.  In these cases, inquiries to the higher ups are either met with silence, or with a canned response such as, “By website policy we do not discuss locked or deleted threads.”

Just recently, this happened at another site.  I won’t name the site, but it’s a social type of a site like Photobucket where you can share and discuss user-created content.  On the site you can make up your own social group, sort of like a sub-forum.  Other site members can join the group and discuss the topic, kind of the way Yahoo! groups works.  These groups are public (I don’t think there’s a way to make them private, actually). Anyone can sign up and post. The group creator is the administrator but the administration tools are pretty simplistic.

Anyway, in this group, which had existed for many years, I had occasionally noticed things going on that probably violated the overall site rules. For example, links to certain policed domains are blocked on this website, and people have regularly done things to get around the block. For example, imagine if the site doesn’t allow discussion of MMOs and “guildportal.com” is a blocked domain.  People would post links to say this guild’s site as “****portal.com/shadowfire” where *** = guild.”  Clearly this is a deliberate attempt to get around the domain block.  Yet these things have been allowed to go on for years, so people kept doing it.

Then there was the posting of content, where the rules clearly state you can only post your own content, not copy other people’s content and upload it as your own.  So imagine a site like Sourceforge where you upload someone else’s (copyrighted) computer code into your own repository.  Again this is a no-no.

As I say, I have seen these things going on for at least a couple of years, and always in the back of my head I have wondered if those posts would get deleted.  They never were. Occasionally users got banned (their posts would suddenly be listed as having no author, etc), but the social forum continued unscathed.

Until last night.

Suddenly I logged back into this site and the group was not listed. “There is no such group on this site,” was the error message.  I thought I had typed the URL wrong but checking indicated that no, the whole thing was gone (probably deleted).  I PMed the group moderator, and he wrote back saying he had no idea what had happened, and that he had never received any warnings or communications from the site overlords.  Just zap, without warning, the group is gone.

Now, again, I know this is not unusual. And I understand the reasons for it.  Flame wars are almost certain to start if deletions or locks are explained — debates about the debate, flames about the flame, etc. And it’s not as if PMing the moderator will necessarily stop that, since the first thing an angry mod will often do is copy-paste the polite PM from the administrator and try to start another flame war. I can see them thinking that, all things considered, the best option is to just delete it silently and never speak of it again.  And as I say, I’ve seen more than enough going on there that I have often expected deletions of threads (though NOT the whole group, as most threads have been pretty innocent).  Indeed I had been agitating for months that we should get our OWN domain and host our own site rather than being a sub-forum on a site with rules we might not like and moderation we cannot control.

However, this incident makes me wonder if it is really the best course of action. Several group members and I have been involved in a hail of PMs at the site in the last 16 hours or so that clearly indicates that no one other than myself was even aware that the mild to moderately serious violations I had noticed WERE violations (one complained at me for not mentioning it, but I was always afraid that calling attention to it was more likely to cause a ban than just ignoring it and letting it go, and I was not, after all, a group moderator, just a member — and it’s also not possible to claim that substituting *** for a blocked domain name, the most common infraction by far, could have been done without the user realizing EXACTLY what he/she was doing).  Even those of us who had noticed and mildly worried about the infractions have no idea which infraction, if any, precipitated the moderation.  Nobody knows why the whole group, rather than a few questionable threads, was eliminated.  Requests by the group moderator to the higher ups have so far gone unanswered (but it’s only been 3/4 of a day so maybe they will respond… however given the history of these things I doubt it).

Regardless of what happens at this site, the incident has, I say, made me question whether the “delete without comment and refuse to answer PMs about it” policy really is the best course of action.  As I say, I understand why sites do this.  But it seems to me they are asking to have to repeatedly moderate threads if they don’t give people a reason why the moderation is going on.  The *** for a blocked domain thing was not created by members of my group. LOTS of people in other groups had done it long before we did.  Perhaps those were moderated (eventually) too… it takes time to catch up to all the violators. But if people are not told WHY they were moderated, how can we expect them to learn from their mistakes?

Here on WordPress, this blog of mine has pretty strict policies about staying on topic and a few times people have posted what can only be described as ads in the comment section, and I have always just deleted those. But if the poster ever PMed me to ask why I had moderated his comment, I would tell him exactly why (“Ads are not allowed on this site, see house rule 7, section a, paragraph c, subsection 2… j/k about the sections).  I don’t see how people can be expected to learn which “borderline” activities that are not always moderated have “gone too far” otherwise. When people are left sitting around saying, “Why did this thread get deleted?”, there’s no chance they can learn from it.

I am sure most site owners would say that their rules are clear, and that there’s no reason to do this. They assume the violators are deliberately being bad — and in the case of “*** = guild”, they clearly are. But is that why the group was deleted, or did someone, unknowingly, commit a much worse infraction? One that he could potentially repeat over and over again on the site not realizing it… causing the need for constant moderation, possibly even being banned.  I’ve always felt that education is better than ignorance, and thought that it was more worthwhile to explain the discipline, rather than just doing it silently.  Otherwise, people can’t learn form their mistakes and there is no chance that their behavior will improve.

The computer was amazing to me when it arrived. So much faster and slicker and better than my old 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 128 MB vid card system, this new system was 3x as fast, had twice as much memory, and twice as much video power.  The games I was playing at the time — Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes — looked so much better with the graphics cranked up, if not to max, at least to “pretty high.”

Now, I came up in a lab that had lots of machines, most of them Suns with unix on them or PCs with linux (shortly after linux first came out).  Under those systems, networked machines had to be named, and at the time the names had to be 8 characters or less.  Our lab usually had some sort of a theme to its computers — such as all marine biology invertebrate names (after all, it was a marine biology lab).  Finding ones under 8 characters was hard but not impossible.  Following this tradition, I’ve named my computers ever since.  The old machine being replaced was named “Thunderbird” (which violates the 8-character limit, but such a limit doesn’t exist anymore), mostly because its CPU was an AMD Athlon chip that had been code-named, you guessed it, “Thunderbird.”  Since that was a bird, I decided to stick with the bird theme, and I named the new P4-3.1 GHz powerhouse “Kestrel.”

Kestrel was a good, strong, solid machine.  It certainly had its issues over time.  Eventually 1 GB of RAM was just not enough, so I bought another GB, doubling the memory. That’s how much it has right now.  The graphics card started causing artifacts and glitches in 2006, and I had to replace it (upgrading to a 7800 GS, which is about all my motherboard can take). At about the same time (and I eventually came to believe, possibly causing the vid card problem), the 425 watt PSU started showing power spikes and dips, and I had to replace that with a 500 watt PSU (my friend of the free monitor sent me one of his “replacement” ones that he had never used by “didn’t need” anymore — another pure gift, I suspect).

However, since that replacement, since 2006, Kestrel, just having passed its 6th birthday in March of this year, has never given me a day of trouble.  The thing has been an absolute rock.  And really, upgrading one component and replacing two, in over six years of heavy use, is pretty darn good.

Kestrel has been a trooper.  He’s run all sorts of games for me, including Company of Heroes, City of Heroes, Spore, Sims 2 and 3 (though 3 was rough for him), Lord of the Rings Online, Battle for Middle Earth II, Knights of the Old Republic I and II, Empire Earth II, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Need for Speed, Vanguard, and a host of others.  It has run Matlab models for me.  It has run Perl models and statistics for me. It has surfed a bazillion websites.  All this with hardly a crash, lockup, or even hiccup, other than the 2006 hardware issues. Kestrel has been one hell of a trooper.

But, as with any computer, Kestrel has long been showing his age.  He doesn’t really have enough RAM or processing power to upgrade to Windows 7.  His fan starts to whine in protest when the virus scanner is running.  And since the holidays, his onboard battery has died, meaning I now have to input the date and time into the computer every time it boots.  And so, it has become time to put Kestrel out to pasture.

I’m going to miss this computer (I’m composing this final post in his honor, using Kestrel right now, in fact).  He’s been a gameday player.   If he were a human being, I’d call him “the man.”  But it is time to move on, and I’ve ordered a new gaming rig from Cyberpower, which should be here in a few weeks.  The computer that is Kestrel will not be thrown out — other than its motherboard battery, it is still functional, and I come from a lab where you never throw out a computer that can be salvaged.  They are always good for something.

This one will have its hard drive wiped, like erasing the memory of a Star Wars droid, and, perhaps fittingly in this Easter season, will be resurrected with the linux system.  It will find a home in my lab, where it will be used as an extra workstation for doing some of the less processor-intensive steps of my lab’s computer work.  As a linux machine it will get a new name — one of the birds or other animals from the marsh area I study when I do field work, perhaps.  And it will live on until its major components die.

But Kestrel, the Windows XP gaming computer, will be no more after this week.  And so I bid it a fond farewell, and thank it for its faithful service. I can only hope I get half as many hours out of my next machine, which will be named after another bird.  And I will post on that, when I receive it.

So long, Kestrel.  Thanks for the many fond memories.

Unfortunately, although much of the moment-to-moment gameplay of DA 2 is pretty good, and in many ways superior to DA 1, this theme of the devs seeming to do things to grief the players has been magnified to such an extreme that many nights, long before it’s time to turn off the Xbox and go to bed, I shut the game down in aggravation and annoyance.  DA 2 has continued the annoying issues with the NPCs and even magnified them.  But worse, you the game lets you completely, totally screw yourself over and doesn’t do a thing to stop you.

For example, you can lose one, and will lose another, party member for most of the latter part of the game.  One character, for instance, was my dedicated healer.  I had the character by 10th level fully tricked out for healing spells and healing equipment (at least as best as the game allows).  I had a system down. All was good. And then 1/3 of the way through the game, that character is x’ed out of the party — and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it.  Now, I had other mages, but not knowing this would happen, I had tricked THEM out for AOE damage and crowd control, not healing.  They’re all 10th level too, and now half their skill points have been spent on non-healing options.  So now I lose my healer, and for the next, oh, 6, 7 levels, I have to painfully add healing to a mage NOT set up for it, so that I can have some healing in the party.   That is just poor.  At a minimum, they needed to let me respec one of the mage’s or something.  Or else wait to give me one mage until the other is x’ed out, and give him to me at level 10 but with all his skill points available, so I can spec him to replace the mage.  After all I’d have the same problem if the x’ed one had been my AOE damage/cc character and the others were healers… I’d lose the AOE damage.

But the impression that the devs are trying to grief the players gets worse.  There is a battle about mid-game, where you fight something highly mobile, that likes to basically teleport all over the battle field.  At certain points in the battle (probably at certain hit-point bookmarks), the thing actually teleports onto a ridge that is physically inaccessible by the player character or any of the party NPCs — you CANNOT reach the bad guy (nor get close enough to shoot him).  I tested this after the battle in the calm of non-combat… and there is no way to get near enough to strike a blow. And yet from this ridge, the bad guy can still shoot AOEs at your party, and does so several times (along with summoning a bunch of pets to attack you).  Now I don’ t mind the pet summon so much — it’s a typical Bioware boss fight without him shooting me.  But the guy being able to shoot my whole party while NONE of us can reach him to shoot or punch back is a violation of every fairness rule in RPGs (either computer or pen and paper) that I’ve ever played.  I kept thinking as I dealt with this griefish encounter that, if this were an MMORPG and I, as a player, found a place like that from which to AOE the mobs, it would be considered an exploit.  And here, in DA 2, they programmed their game to attack the player with what amounts to an MMO exploit.  I can’t consider this to be anything else but the devs of the game griefing me.

Lots of other little to large elements of the game feel like griefing as well. I have my character as tricked out as I can make her (level 20 rogue) and yet, still, she can be one-shotted by almost any boss. One-shotted!  She’s at full HP, and suddenly an SFX appears on screen (usually from something like a mage-based enemy), and she’s dead.  In one hit.  She has spirit resistance, fire resistance, nature resistance, frost resistance, almost as much armor as the tank and way more defense… and she gets one-shotted.  And then we have the fact that stamina and mana are at a premium late in the game.  Bad guys go from dying in one blow to taking literally hundreds upon hundreds of attacks to bring down.  Fights include multiple bosses (or at least, guys that were considered bosses in the early game) and what I can only call an “elite” boss, with what can only be tens to hundreds of thousands of hit points (if the damage numbers I’m seeing on my screen relative to the pixels of health done are accurate), and yet in a few specials all my characters are down to zero stamina and default attacks.  Sure you can use a potion to restore stamina, but in a few blows you are back to zero again, and have to wait 40 or 50 seconds to take another sip.  This makes the battle end up just taking an obscenely long amount of time (one of them took almost 5 real time minutes, to kill ONE guy). Almost all of that time, you’re just hitting your default attack like a psychopath, click-click-click-click as fast as you can.  Oh yes, that’s High Tactics.

And then there is the utter stupidity of your party’s AI.  I cannot understand how the team that created such smart, almost genius level, AI companions in ME 1/2, can create ones that are so stupid that unless I go in and MANUALLY program them, can’t do anything right.  The ME 2 AI is smart enough to take cover, target the right enemies, use specials the right way to take down shields, etc, and I almost never have to hit pause to tell them what to do.  Why can’t the DA 2 NPCs do the same thing?  I don’t mind being able to *edit* the default behavior, but just using it shouldn’t be the kiss of death. Yet I’ve tried it unedited, and the options are stupid and ineffective.  For example, unless you program it, your NPCs will never, ever, use a healing potion.  Duh.

So… I don’t know if the guys who designed DA 2 were stupid, or incompetent, or rushed, or what. But what it feels like to me, is that they’re a bunch of jerks who sat around cackling and trying to figure out the best way to piss off the players, and then the next best way, and the next, and pack as many frustrating elements and scenes into the game as they could.  Then they compounded the error by making only a tiny handful of map areas and forcing me to re-experience them over and over again (because we all love repetition!), and making a story that has all the expansiveness and grandeur of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

And I have to say, quite honestly, that if these annoying elements make it into TOR… I will almost certainly not subscribe to it past the first free month.  I can only hope that since it’s a totally different team, they didn’t do anything like this crap.

There are generally two reasons why these articles are almost always useless.  First, the people in them are usually wasting obscene amounts of money on things that not only I, but everyone I know would consider a waste, like subscribing to a “fruit of the month club” (that’s an “Everybody Loves Raymond” joke I threw in there).  Second, most of the suggestions are inapplicable to my own personal situation — like ways to save on mortgage, which are useless to me because I pay rent.

To see what I mean, let’s dissect the most recent installment of this inane breed of articles, from Yahoo! finance.  The couple being described in this article saved $500. Let’s see how much of that $500 would be applicable to me, if I were to copy them.

Cable TV – They saved $125. Could I, by copying them? Well… no.  First, they were paying an unbelievable $165/month for cable.  Anyone who pays that much to watch television deserves to go broke, in my opinion.  Nothing on television is worth even half this amount.  When my own cable company tried to change my rates to $90/mo ($75/mo less than this couple’s regular rate), I came within a hair of canceling my service, and only backed off when they lowered my rates to $58/mo.  Even that is highway robbery for watching television shows that are already paid for by the endless stream of commercials I’m forced to watch in between the actual (and rather low quality) content that pollutes the airwaves. But I can stomach $58/mo…. it’s (barely) acceptable.   So, one reason why I couldn’t copy them and save $125/mo. by switching to a $40/mo. satellite is because I wasn’t stupid enough to pay $165/mo. to begin with. I’d only be able to save $18/mo.  On top of that, I can’t put a satellite dish up here — it’s allowed, but trees block the line of sight (I live in an apartment that’s basically in the woods).  So I couldn’t follow the advice if I wanted to, and even if I followed it, I’d only save $18/mo., not $125.  This is a perfect example of how easy it is to save money if you’re spending it unwisely.  They were… I don’t think I am. So this wouldn’t work for me.

For the sake of brevity, I will leave aside the fact that what they’re probably not telling you is that the $40 rate is only good for a year, after which point DishNetwork or DirecTV is going to jack their rates up by double or more.

Landline – They saved $90. These guys use only their cell phones and so they did away with their landline. Could I do the same and save $90? Again… no. First of all, I don’t pay $90/mo. for my landline. I pay about that for my landline and FastDSL internet service combined.  Since the landline is a little more than half that, I could save maybe $50/mo. if I did away with the landline.  However, my landline + DSL is a bundle, so my DSL would probably go up in exchange. Additionally, unlike them, I actually primarily use my landline, not my cellphone, which I only really need for emergencies. And finally, my apartment (because it’s basically in the woods, again), seems almost like it has a cellphone jamming device built into my building, because I get horrible cell service inside my apartment (but step outside and it’s not too bad).  I wouldn’t want to rely on the cellphone exclusively and therefore, to me, getting rid of the landline is unsafe. So this wouldn’t work for me, although it could save me $50 or so.

If you’re keeping track, so far they were spending way more than I was, but their new rates put them $68 ahead… They’re $+18 from their satellite dish (vs. my cable) and they got rid of their land line, which in theory could save me $50 if I copied them (but not $90, since again they started out paying almost double what I pay for my landline).

Cellphones – They saved $165. These guys are clearly morons, because they were spending a whopping, unbelievable $265/mo. for cellphone service. I don’t know what they have, because even the most insanely luxurious plan I have ever specced out to go with an iPhone (I’ve fantasized about it but never taken the actual plunge) is only about $90/mo.  Even doubling that is $180. Why these idiots were paying $265 for cell service is just beyond me. But yeah, if you’re stupid enough to pay that much for cell service you could save a lot by downgrading your plans and changing to a cheaper provider.  The article couple saved $165 by going with a pay-go $100/mo. service.   I’m glad they saved that money, but they’re still paying $60 more per month than I am (my service with all fees and taxes included is just under $40/mo.).  So there’s absolutely no reason to do what they did, because they’re still (in my view) wasting tons of money.

If you’re keeping track, they’re now a grand total of $8 ahead of me… because they lost a lot of ground on the cell phones.

Auto insurance – They saved $40. The guy in the article was paying $80/mo. for car insurance, and swapped to Geico for a $40 rate. That’s better than my rate of $60 from Allstate, but I like Allstate, and I trust them (I’ve been with them for almost 20 years), and I am not going to switch over for $20. This does put them slightly further ahead.

Homeowner’s Insurance – They saved $83. This category is inapplicable to me, since I rent.  They pay something like $800 a year now, when they were paying $1800 before.  I have no idea what homeowner’s rates are, but rental insurance is like $100 a year. I’m going to ignore this category since it’s not comparable. But let’s not ignore the fact that the guy in the article admits that every company offered him between $800 and $1000 better rates than his existing company, which means he and his wife, again, are idiots. They apparently did not know to shop around for the best rates.

If you’re keeping track, the couple in the article is now $28 ahead of me — meaning if I copied them in every detail, even in ways I physically can’t, like putting up a satellite dish, I’d save $28 a month over what I pay now.  The main reason I can’t save as much as they did is because I was already doing as well as they ended up doing in terms of the rates I pay for things.  This couple was able to save $500/mo. because they were morons, and were throwing money away by paying obscene rates for things that aren’t worth half of what they were spending.

This article is typical of the genre. The only way you could follow their example and save hundreds or thousands of dollars, is if you were as idiotic as the people in the article were to begin with.  If you’ve already got decent rates and are already spending your money relatively wisely, you won’t be able to save  much by following their advice, and in some cases you won’t even be able to follow the advice.

So here’s my advice: Spend your money wisely, and don’t pay idiotic rates for your cable and cell service.