The closest Starcraft game ever

My friend just forwarded this to me. I know, I am dead tired right now because the new baby, but still I can't help playing games or watch those.

Oragn vs BackHo

Swine Flu in WOW

I am not kidding, it exists in WOTLK!
See this on wowinsider

Funny.

Hornets vs Honey bee

The following video can be disturbing to some, so be warned.

This is a video of the fight between hornets and bees. The hornets are bigger and stronger, but the Japanese honey bees got a secret weapon :-)

High income tax and housing bubble

Yep I never realized the relationship between higher tax and housing bubble, till I read this article. The guy is odd looking but he is British.

Basically what he said is, too high a income tax not only cause talents/business to move out, it could cause housing bubble.

The reason is, income tax is usually created through wealth creating (i.e. employment work), while capital gains tax is created through speculation (i.e. stock market, housing market), and in most countries income tax is much higher than capital gains tax (else you will feel very unhappy when you sale your house).

That is why it is much easier to speculate on houses instead of creating wealth, and by taxing the rich, the government is actively encouraging a bubble on either stock or housing market. Now when more people are speculating and less people are doing the actual work of producing wealth, the entire system eventually will crashing down at some point.

Out rage of the day

Time Warner and Embarq trying to kill small competitions

Remember last week on Broken Toys when people were angry about Time Warner trying to make limits on how much people can use their boradband? I am actually a bit OK with that. But not when they are trying to kill competition.

A competitive free market is what make the US so great, it is not big companies use government power to help themselves nor politicians printing money to buy votes.

OMG

My daughter was born yesterday (2009-Apr-21) at 11:56 pm. It was a long process and I was there every step of the way. I have to say that the child birth process is, PG13. I think I finally know how the writers of some of the best SCIFI movies get their ideas, they just change the child birth process a little bit and used the same theme.

I will be a father soon

Since Blizzard already knows more about me than myself, I will just blog some of my personal stuff.

Yesterday the doctor told us that our baby at 36 week is too small, and need to be induced. So I am at hospital today. The give the drug yesterday night and just broke her water. The pain is bad.

I am so happy that I made the decision not to go to court, else I will be in a huge mess right now.

damn

Just found that I forget to remove the downloads from my OLD downloads section. That section is where I put the zoloFighter for old versions. I stumped there today and found the links are still working (and possibly the offsets are still working too). I will need to remember to remove them when I got home this noon, else the blizzard guys might think that I try to cheat them.

This is the problem when you have done something for over 2 years, you got stuff every where (kind of like when I do updates to offsets, keep forgetting to update some of them).

And another note, Pirate Bay went down. It is not good to pirate, but it will be bad to all of us too. Someone could post a pirate link as a comment on one of my old blog entries, I will never found that out and I could be fined!

The courts can be so confusing

That is why it is never a good idea to go to court.

I was doing some more readings on Blizzard vs MDY, and here is another case that almost contradicts MAI vs. Peak : Storage Technology Corp. v. Custom Hardware Eng’g & Consulting, Inc

I spend about 2 hours reading it since I can't figure out part of its logic, and I still don't quit understand it. The conclusion seems to be, even in the case the defendant win, if the copy right owner has made the license restrict enough, the defendant would have lost.

I also learned that my 1102 fair use defense won't work either, huge surprise.

And I don't want to spend another hour reading Blizzard's EULA. It is boring (unlike the case study), and in the most unlikely case that the EULA does has hole, I will still won't want to go to court.

P.S. This blog is now totally devoted to public education, I am sure the links used can be allowed under section 1102 fair use.

Lost all 3 passwords

A couple of days ago when I tried to upload a new version of fighter, I found the password was changed.

Then yesterday when I tried to post on my forum, I forget my password and have to reset it.

Later on when I tried to do a refund for donors for the past month, I found I lost my paypal password too.

Almost thought someone hacked in.

The End

I just got contacted by a lawyer from Blizzard. Not sure how but they got my contact info (I guess from DNS records) and called me at work.

At first I heard he say something like "I am a lawyer from Blue entertainment ...", and I thought "Oh another advertisement", then he asked about zoloFighter, and my thought was "WHAT?!!".

All conversions are confidential, so I can't disclose much. I just got home and have disabled the bot. It was fun while it lasted.

Every thing can go wrong on tax/patch day

It is already post patch day but it is still the tax day.

So whatever can go wrong did went wrong. The last thing I could think of is that I lost my forum admin password.... Now I can't login to post messages.

Anyway, all will be fixed.

I forget so many things

Usually I can't get up early, not even for work. But I woke up today and have to get this done.

Yep, for wow 3.1 update, I didn't provide a download link!

And this update also require a binary change, and I forget to force all users to download.

Anyway, the servers are down right now, I updated the changes and hopefully I didn't break anything.

EDIT: Just updated again to 0.8.6.10. It fixes the stupid "pre mob" bug.
And, DO NOT afk bot. there are so many offsets that I forget to update, the bot could break at any new events that I have not tested.

3.1 updated

0.8.6.8 released. You must download the new version to use.

I did some test and it looks like basic functions are working, however the bot tries to attack all mobs, include your npcs etc. It will be worked out this week, and now wife is really argoing and I gtg.

Good timing for overtime

The bad news is, I am stuck in office for some emergency fixing, while patch 3.1 is been released today.

The good news, is the patch got delayed again and again so I am not missing anything.

Silverlight 3 Beta 1

I don't know how I missed this, must be the stupid taxes (this falls perfectly with my previous post on Dr Rodger's report, if we spend more time on taxes, we will have less time doing research).

Silverlight 3 beta 1 has released. Here are the features.

Now I got one more thing to wait on besides Starcraft II

Why taxes and subsidies are bad

Here is Dr. Rodgers' Testimony before House Committee on Science, Space and Technology

Dr. Rodgers, who start up Cypress with himself and an old computer, is at the time the CEO of Cypress (maker of the best super computer equipments) and an investor.

I highly advise you read the original testimony. Here are some of the good parts.

1. Against raise tax on those rich people who got a "free ride" in the 1980s:

So please allow me to reintroduce myself: I am an excess of the 1980s. Based on my ownership stake in Cypress, I am one of the people who, in the President's words, "profited most from the uneven prosperity of the last decade." I became a paper millionaire in the 1980s--eight times over, in fact.

How did I profit? I started a company in Silicon Valley. I obtained stock in that company when it had one employee (me) and one used computer. I worked with that company for a decade--sixteen hours a day, six days a week--to help get it where it is today.

And where is it? Over its ten-year history, Cypress has generated over $1 billion in cumulative revenue, made over $160 billion in profits on which we paid $60 million in taxes, created 1,500 jobs which paid cumulative salaries of nearly $500 million, on which our employees paid further taxes of $150 million. We have shipped cumulative exports worth $300 million. We have generated a market value of $500 million for our shareholders and employees--all of whom own stock in the company.

If that is an "excess of the 1980s," let's have more!

2. Against government subsidies (At the time the government are considering giving tax payer money to high tech companies including his):

Or think about Europe. Amazingly, we still have "experts" who want us to emulate Europe's alphabet soup of technology consortiums such as JESSI, their equivalent of the U.S. chip consortium Sematech. JESSI showered billions on the European semiconductor industry. It also "rationalized" the industry by allocating certain market segments to various companies. Siemens became the DRAM company for Europe--and has since gone out of the business. Philips became the SRAM company for Europe--and has since gone out of that business.

After inadvertently weakening its chip industry, Europe then established 14% import duties on foreign chips--the next logical step of desperate government policy. The import duty had precisely the effect we might expect: It raised the price of components to the European computer industry and virtually wiped it out as well. Today, there is no European chip industry or computer industry to speak of--thanks to the role of government programs like JESSI. European taxpayers gave up part of their income to wipe out two critical industries! We can't afford to emulate such failed experiments.

I have to say this is an eye opener. Just excellent.

Boot your OS in 2 seconds

And Intel has done it with linux.

Shutdown the internet?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/obama-shut-down-internet-legislation,7478.html#xtor=RSS-181

I doubt this could ever happen. However even if this doesn't happen with Obama, it might happen to the next President. There might be an attack and he over think the risk and shutdown the internet.

I think cyber attacks are overly hyped.

Change of heart

If you read my blog, you know I fiercely oppose socialized health care. I believe it will drive up our taxes and make long queues at hospitals.

I had a change of heart today after our company again changed health care providers, and I have to fill in all of the non-senses and stuff that I don't understand, and have no interest in what so ever.

So if we do have socialized health care, the pros will be we don't need to worry about health care ever. The cons will be the tax will be up, and for big surgery, you have to wait, because government provided cares will never be as flexible as one driven by market.

However, given the current situation, this might not be bad.

First of all, even though I don't believe in global warming any more, I do believe we need to conserve energy, and we need to fight pollutions. And I believe the earth is over populated. So anything that could reduce human population is potentially a good thing (even war). With socialized health care, more and more people will realize that.

Second, as the case in Canada shows, even under socialized health care, there will be private providers and for people who work hard, they can pay the private sector to get treatment.

So basically the system could provide both convenience and flexibility. Of course since we human beings are so short sighted I could be wrong, the government could over tax us to death to provide health care, but I am not the one to decide.