Normally, I take a look at the Greenpeace website every now and then so I can get a good laugh out their articles, but now things are just turning sour. As we all know, the Live Earth concerts were this month and as always, they lacked any sort of definitive goal on combating climate change. Then environmentalist lifestyle pushed by Greenpeace goes beyond simply wanting to care for the environment, it seeks to push its militant ideas onto countries who are reliant on old methods of farming and industrialisation. The only real objective that they have is to mobilise mass amounts of ignorant people to lobby for the passing of legislation that inhibits developing countries.

There are so many issues to criticise Greenpeace on, but I’ll just stick to one about rainforest destruction in the Congo.

It’s not too late to prevent the destruction of this incredible rainforest, and by putting pressure on the World Bank, that’s exactly what we intend to do.

Rather than suggesting any sort of reason as to why the rainforest is being chopped down, Greenpeace leaps to the plan of attack by telling its readers to contact their government and put and end to this. Read the article for yourself and you will see that they offer no plausible alternative for a country that’s ridden by poverty and war. Third world countries don’t cut down rainforests because they’re terrible people who want to rid our world of diverse fauna, they do it because they can’t afford to import wood from other countries. I’m not for the destruction of the rainforest, but I don’t believe that picketing, emailing government officials, or writing pointless articles about it helps the situation.

After looking at a list of main issues that Greenpeace’s US section wants to fight, all they suggest as their plan of action is to send a generic email to your congressperson. The international site asks for volunteers and skilled people to work for them, but for what? To produce films, “push envelopes”, and to write their articles. Nowhere do they suggest that people should volunteer to live in these communities and help them rely on “green” ways of doing things. They jump to antagonise countries who are only guilty of not being able to afford to run using environmentally-friendly methods. It’s so easy for those of us in developed countries to sit back and become vegetarians and environmentalists because we’re comfortable enough to do that. We’re not starving or poor, we’re able to make decisions about what we want to eat and how we want to live our lives. Others don’t. The answer isn’t to criticise others when we can’t even imagine what their situation is like.

Known Email Addresses:

• industrial@jagex.com

• interviewing@recruit.jagex.com

• osupport@recruit.jagex.com

• jobs-modeller@recruit.jagex.com

• advertising@jagex.com

• business@jagex.com

• jobs-prmanager@jagex.com

• polls@jagex.com

Locations of listed offices or related locations:

11 Sturton Street, Cambridge, CB1 2SN, UK

90 St Andrews House (haha!), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire CB4 1DL, UK

St Johns Innovation Centre Cowley Rd near Cambridge CB4 0WS, UK

This photo is where all media enquiries on behalf of Jagex are received.

Alleged Phone/Fax number for Jagex:

Info for the Sturton Street address:
Tele: 01223 503 861
Fax: 01223 515 212

Employees:

300 since June 2007 (Wikipedia)

Investors:

Insight Venture Partners

So, there was a Sandbox post about Bush supposedly saying that the Constitution was “just a goddamned piece of paper”. Not only did I notice later on that said article was posted in late 2005, I found out that it was also a hoax put up by a blog. What made this article slightly believable (but also hilarious) was the fact that President Bush, admit it, has a history of committing social un-niceties (you can call them faux pas, I call them un-niceties.).

The really unnerving part about this all was the fact that rather debating the authenticity of the article (which I admittedly should’ve done), people were trying to justify it! “Well..what he REALLY meant was…” No! I find it so utterly disappointing that people think that just because they feel the need to support someone (Bush), they have to throw all common sense into the wind. If someone I supported said something like that, I’d do my best to find out whether or not a) Their words were taken out of context or b) They ever even said it at all.

It’s wonderful if you want to support a politician or anyone in power, but for God’s sake, don’t blindly make excuses for their actions. If Angela Merkel said that she liked locking orphans in a large box and then throwing the box in the ocean, I wouldn’t say “Well, I think that she actually meant to say that she’d lock their sorrows and hunger in a box and throw this box into the ocean so that they can be happy and carefree once more!”

With that said, putting forth the argument “Well, they were under pressure/stress” is also complete nonsense. When you’re a politician, you have to watch everything you say and do. It’s a fact of life that most politicians and presidents realise. That’s why you don’t see too many of them flipping out in places where their words can be recorded/written down.

Conservative or liberal, people need to start seeking the truth on their own rather than relying on half-truths. That’s challenging for all of us and there are times where we mess up. Yet, to make assumptions on things were there is no proof is just unbelievably dumb.

Okay, let’s face it. Most of the people who are probably reading this blog indulge in some type of piracy. I won’t confirm or deny whether or not I do. Last night, I was thinking that maybe if there were a compelling reason to download music legally, people would do it. There are a few ideas out there about how the RIAA and MPAA should go about selling music:

• Charge 5 cents a song. This seems almost absurd at first, but think about how many people would choose to buy a song for 5 cents at CD quality rather than trying their luck at Limewire and mistakingly downloading three minutes of silence. According to this theory, record labels would make plenty of money on the fact that people would buy large amounts of music rather than stealing.
• Charge a flat rate per month. I would possibly do this if it meant that I got an unlimited number of music downloads and if the monthly rate was affordable.
• Release films on DVD on the day of their cinema debut. Seriously, no one wants to wait 3-4 months to purchase a film on DVD.
• Product placement in films to cheapen the cost of DVDs or film tickets. This is a novel idea, but I don’t think I want to see a Pepsi can appear on the set every 5 minutes.

I’m sure there are more/better ideas out there as well. The answer, however, isn’t to encourage people to steal music by inflating CD prices, putting internet radio out of business, and go after people who download.

And I put up a review of a good classic novel.

I was just glancing over the PHPBB website and I saw that it’s getting closer to release. It’s currently on RC3 (released on th 8th and RC2 was released shortly earlier on the 24th of June. I think that things are finally moving quickly and we’ll soon be able to have a forum that is capable of more than before! I looked at the new features that’ll be expected with PHPBB 3 and it sounds so amazing. Check out some of these:

• Set group avatar. I totally vote for the moderator group to have a unicorn avatar. I don’t know what the other group avvys should be. Maybe we should make a contest for people to develop some.
• Signature on profile view. I can’t tell you how useful this would be. It’s a lot easier to check for sigs that break the rules by looking at someone’s profile. The reason being is that someone might have some links to “bad” websites, but because they haven’t posted yet, moderators cannot see their signature.
• Create unlimited subforums. Yay. Now I can bug Shane and Mike to make the “Mushrooms” subforum.
• Create your own BBCodes. I wouldn’t know how to do this, but it just seems too cool.
• Topic merging. I’ve always wanted this. Sometimes, people post topics that are similar or they post multiple topics about the same thing. It’d be so much easier to just incorporate the discussion into one single place.
• Topic history. This also would be nice. I don’t know how it’d work or what the layout would be (I don’t moderate any forums that are on rc2/3 right now, so if anyone knows..send me a screenshot).

You can check out more features here. There’s also going to be a “friend” or “foe” list. I don’t know. I see that as kind of pointless. Usually if you disagree with someone, you still are interested in what they post XD

That’s right. If you code up your own goal sigs for your site, then you ARE STEALING FROM DRAYNOR. I’m amused at the ignorance that sometimes goes on there. They actually believe that the idea of making goal sigs is stealing their idea. Hello, Draynor, guess what? RSBANDB were the first to introduce stats/goal sigs. Do you see us coming to you about it? No. Instead, we continue to do what we do to remain competitive. We don’t sit around and whine. We also don’t send little love notes to Leetscape (the supposed perpetrators who “stole” the goal sig idea) telling them that they need to remake their goal sigs.

Do the goal sigs look similar? Yes.

Leetscape goal signature:

Draynor goal signature:

Is that copyright infringement? No. Because they did not copy Draynor’s exact graphics. Draynor, if I were in your position I wouldn’t whine about this. I’d make new (hopefully better) goal sigs. When it comes down to it, people want something that looks nice. These sigs are just mediocre and you all apparently ripped them from an open source code. Here is an excerpt of what a Draynor mod (who somehow appointed himself as ambassador of Draynor.net) sent the admin of Leetscape:

Draynor.net Mod:
Hello, I’m a moderator on the Draynor.net forums and I have noticed the similarity between our signatures. I’m talking about the goal signatures of course. I don’t know if you got the idea from us or if it is complete coincidence, but I was wondering if you could perhaps make a few changes so that they don’t look identical. Draynor.net has had our goal signatures up for a while now and we would really appreciate if you did this.

Thank you,
Draynor.net Forums.

Admin’s Reply:
They will not be changed as you never made them (Draynor).

They are a fully open source created by JazzC, RuneCrypt used them first, then Clooth copied the idea 100% using the code created by Jazz, they’re totally free and come like that as default, sorry but your developers did nothing to develop them at all.

Cheers to you, Leetscape.

I don’t know how many of you listen to internet radio, but I do. I’ve always enjoyed listening to Pandora, a radio service which gears an entire station toward your musical preferences. It’s really saddened me to see how the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) raised royalty rates to the point that most radio webcasters will go out of business.

If anything, internet radio has done wonders for the music industry. New artists are being discovered every single day through services like Pandora. It’s a shame to see the CRB tax the life out of it. It just goes to show that nothing really ever is about the core issue, music. It’s about how much money can be made on taxing people out of existence.

For now, the Save Internet Radio group has won a temporary reprieve from more drastic measures that were about to take effect. In a new scheme, formulated by the infinitely wise CRB,  creating an internet radio station would cost about 6,000 USD. Considering that many of the internet radio stations that I listen to are broadcasted from the US, I’m still upset at the high price that comes with this “deal”.

I don’t want to hijack this post with uselessness, but here’s something I thought funny XD

Ok, this service is awesome. You sign up and put yourself on a waiting list for popular invite-only sites like Joost, Pownce, Moola, etc. Then, someone who has extra invites will send you an invite. In return, you confirm that this person has invited you and they receive higher status on their own waiting lists. At first, the Digg Effect brought InviteShare to a sluggish pace, but now things are up and fully running.

After putting my name on the list for Joost and Moola, I got my invites in 5 minutes. I’m now waiting on Demonoid and Oink (if any of you have an invite to either, I’d much appreciate it if you sent me one). The system only works when people who receive invites return the favour by giving invites out to others. I’ve given away a lot of my Pownce invite already and I’m giving away tons of Joost ones too. (Sorry, all out of Moola ones. Plus, most people reading this blog probably shouldn’t be on that site anyway :P)

read more | digg story

I’ve been thinking about something that my International Politics professor once told me. “When you first meet someone, try to refrain from talking about religion and politics. If you become friends with this person, put off these controversial conversations for as long as you can and see how well your friendship does without it”. That got me thinking about whether or not friendships are forged based on how we agree/disagree with people about controversial issues today. Do we naturally want people whom we agree with as friends? If that’s so, then are we even making the effort to really learn about all types of people?

Sure, a lot of us (me included) will say that we have friends that we agree with on some things, but disagree with on others. If you were to sit down with your friend and seriously map out your views on life, would this person have more things similar to your beliefs than not? Likely so. “Birds of a feather flock together”.

My own personal challenge (which you could take up if you want) is to take the advice of my professor and see how well a friendship goes without debates on abortion and god. I believe that a lot of people subconsciously (or consciously) push people away when they realise that they do not share the same views. Thus, I’m making a change in the way that I interact with people.

After lots of thinking, I decided to put up a Reviews page where I can review anything I like (books, films, music). I don’t count on anyone reading them really, but I figure that at least one or two people might be interested. I really would like to see my other friends to do the same. I like reading about what people..like. What can I say? So if you’re reading this and you have a blog, consider doing it.

In other not-important news, I uploaded some new art. I really liked this one, but I don’t know if it will become popular or anything. I’m trying to get away from the whole “lonely looking woman doing something in front of a outdoor background”. I realise that some artists get really famous for that type of art (ie Princess-of-Shadows). There’s only so much dark-depressing-I-want-to-drown-myself-in-this-ocean art you can really make without it getting old. Granted, I’m not trying to slam people who make art like this. They’re skilled and everything, but it’s starting get me into the habit of making the same thing and I don’t like that. If I had a graphics tablet, I’d be a lot better off. I could at least practise painting and airbrushing. Since I don’t want a cheap one, I’ll have to wait to get a job.