Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Google, Prince, Bayesian
Please confirm, over. After reports that the People's Republic of China was blocking access to Google, an anonymous reader writes: "I'm working in China, and for the last 3 days Google and some other sites were not accessible. But since even sending SMS to europe didn't work I don't think it was censoring, more like routing problems of some sort. Anyway, Google is back and reports of slashdot blocking are also overrated :)"
Cradle of Democracy, or Regular Cradle? Many readers have written to point out that, just like they promised to in March, the government of Greece has gone ahead and banned electronic games. xlurker, for instance, writes "In an unbelievable move the Greek government has banned all public play of computer games with enactment of law 3037/2002. An english translation of it can be read here. This has been reported in the Greek newspaper Kathimerini and recently confirmed in detail at the German Heise site (Google translation). The law encompasses all appliances that play games, as ludicrous this sounds, it spans from cells ph ones and computers to gameboys and consoles. Greek internet cafes are protesting and international gaming events are being cancelled and relocate d. The bill was passed as a last ditch effort by the government to combat gambling. Thousands of Greek citizens have protested the blanket anti-gaming law. Online petitions can be found here and at the Greek Net Cafe site."
Welcome to your new email account. In addition to the Bayesian spam filter for Qmail mentioned in a previous Slashback, an anonymous reader writes "An article here talked about using statistical methods to classify spam (and perhaps other mail) automatically. A real implementation of this has been released (currently beta) here that acts as a POP3 proxy and works with any mail client. It inserts an X-Text-Classification: header in each mail message containing a classification of the mail into any of a number of classes that the user defines. The code is mostly Perl and an LGPL library so although the current version is for Windows it will work on other platforms and the author is asking for suggestions and testers."
Yes, I'd like to be paid in unlucky-pop-star weights, please. 21mhz writes "Reuters reports: Russia's space agency has scrapped 'N Sync singer Lance Bass's plans to join an October space mission after the U.S. pop star failed to meet payment deadlines. More details from AP. The guys that do real stuff at ISS will get an extra cargo package the weight of the unlucky pop singer."
And Lo, eleven shall have been selected, and it is so. AmateurHuman writes "After two delays, Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, have announced that the first stage of the New Fantasy Setting Search is completed. Eleven out of 11,000 entries were selected. Good job to those lucky eleven!"
Slashdot is not responsible for the content of external links. ttyp writes "We've all seen Janis Ian's opinions about P2P and the RIAA but, man, does Prince take it to a new level! Check out the artist's commentary A Nation of Thieves wherein Prince wonders, 'How long, however, b4 a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, 2 leave the system 4 good? How long b4 a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and r careful not 2 get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long b4 a critical mass of art lovers get 2gether 2 provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the xisting system artistically irrelevant?' Also check out the links to other commentaries on this page."
Eugenia Loli needs to exposed. I will post 3 articles that show how fascist the Greeks can be, and that people like Eugenia perpetrate. Then I will cover My Big Fat GReek Wedding, with Fat being the operative word. Then some random Eugenia quotes. I hate you Eugenia, for being a fascist at OSNEWS. You are a pathetic waif who can not accept dissent, and you dictate to your small and withering community. I hope you get ovarian cancer.
Fat Eugenia Loli's Friends Ban all electronig games by mistake. Its people like Eugenia Loli that show that the formerly great state of Greece has erorded into a festering inbred, stupid hairy totalitarian fucks like herself. Now is the fatty greases sweltering out of her cellulite that makes it seem like Grease would be a more apropro name than Greece.
The Night Defender Fat Eugenia Loli Fat
Sweating and farting nervously on the verge of mental meltdown, ELQ reloads each of her precious OSNews pages, making sure all is well. Fifty Internet Explorer windows are open in Windows XP, it's gridning the hard drive to death. ELQ's cable modem and NIC activity LEDs are nearly solid from the raw frenzy of almost constant browser reloading. Eugenia's eyes twitch rapidly from window to window with Mercurial speed to make sure that any rogue comments do not escape her attention, always hitting her refresh buttons with pinpoint accuracy. No logical order for checking, purely random and impulse driven by raw Mediterranean temper, stopping for the occasional savage bite from a pork loin still affixed to the bone, Eugenia's eyes never leave the monitor.
"N-n-n-n NO! No TIME for Dance Dance Revolution, oh but it's been so long! I cannot allow the BASTARD flooders' comments to be seen. MY DOMAIN IS SACRED!"
Hair is frizzled and days unwashed, asscrack just barely half wiped in a frenzy to return to her monitor, having taken a large shit earlier. No time to flush! Her armpits are over-ridden with pubic hair, her fat flaps reek of B.O. and yeast from days of neglect and hour upon hour of sweating. Relentless sweating.
"Cannot to be keeps up this pace! I may be need to go to hospital for exhaustions" she pants in desperation, wiping the sweat from a matted hair lock with her week-old t-shirt offering.
The hour of judgement approaches! Comment number 45 in thread 374 is clearly of anti-Greek sentiment! It reads "Eugenia continues to post yet another story that's simply ripped off from other websites. How much longer can this continue? It's my opinion that she has poor editorial skills. I think they should be revoked."
"YOU BASTARD FUCK!", Eugenia erupts in raw hatred, simultaneously ripping a 120 decibel-at-1-meter fart into the back of her chair. "Nobody is to be attack my site!" Eugenia blasts away at 10 words per minute in a barely-coherant broken English. She's on a mission. After several hours, the words on the screen are completely shattered and in disarray, they make no sense. Eugenia is impressed with her English progress and submits her lousy retort. Relaxing only for several seconds to savor the rush, she continues her patrol, sleepless into the night.
Greeks ban electronic games by mistake
Beware Greeks writing laws
By Adamson Rust: Sunday 01 September 2002, 17:40
ONE OF THE SO-CALLED CRADLES of European civilisation appears to have got its Aristotles all in a twist over computer gaming. And mobile phones, for that matter.
The Greek government appears to have lost its marbles.
The government wanted to prevent its people from wasting their money by using electronic slot machines but the democratically appointed government has banned all computer games everywhere by mistake.
And now the cops are raiding Internet cafes to enforce the said SNAFU.
The law, according to our Greek correspondents, prohibits any kind of game that is played on any kind of electronic equipment.
And it appears to have been drafted so loosely that that includes mobile phones.
Theoretically, the cops could bust into people's homes but so far apparently they have arrested Internet cafe owners and customers who were fighting a few rounds of Q3 CTF.
Next thing, the cops will be creeping up on people using their mobile phones just to make sure they're not playing a quick game rather than using them for their real purpose.
Here are some details of the cock up in Greek.
And there's more details about this at the Greek Net Cafe organisation.
Give us a glass of hemlock, Socrates!
Greek govt bans all computer games
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 03/09/2002 at 16:45 GMT
The government of Greece is making heroic efforts to humiliate the nation in front of the entire world, by banning all electronic games. That's right; something as innocent as playing computer chess on your laptop in a hotel lobby is now a crime with penalties of up to three months in stir and a fine of 10,000 euros.
The purpose behind this charming legislation is to crack down on Internet gambling (which already was illegal) -- or, rather, to enable legislators to enact their little public dance of righteous aversion to Internet gambling.
Improved enforcement of existing law is all that was needed, but there's a problem. Unfortunately, the Greek government is "incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines," according to an older article from the English-language Kathimerini newspaper, written while the bill was under consideration.
Now it's official. The legislature has concluded that all electronic games have got to go because the bureaucrats they're maintaining on the public payroll aren't swift enough to figure out the difference between video poker and TuXkart. Perhaps enforcing literacy requirements and sobriety regulations for government workers would have been a more productive approach, but it's too late for that now.
Greek ban on gaming threatens Internet cafes
By John Lettice Posted: 04/07/2002 at 12:49 GMT
A Register reader in Greece emails us claiming that the Greek government has effectively outlawed Internet cafes by "all LAN and Internet games and any kind of game that is supported by electrical, electronic or software means." If anybody so much as has something looking like a game on the screen, he tells us, the cafe manager is liable for arrest.
All of this makes some kind of perverted sense. Computers in Internet cafes are gaming machines, sort of. Or at least they have that potential, and Greece has already shown signs of considering them as such. More recently, Greece banned all amusement and gambling machines, including the likes of Pac Man.
You pay for computers in Internet cafes, you can play games on them, so yes, there you go. And a little further research leads us to believe that Greece's position is maybe not so wildly eccentric as one might initially think. Here in the UK one does have to pay duty on gaming and amusement machines in public places. You can get a little more information about the position by tearing through this section of the 1995 Finance Act, but frankly we do not recommend it.
It would however seem logical to us for Internet cafe machines playing games to be classed somewhere within the amusement machines category, and therefore liable for duty. If they're not, then pubs installing computers instead of amusement machines could be on to a good wrinkle. So, some form of cafe tax? OK, but what, then, are we going to do about all of those people in pubs who'll sometime soon be whipping out their 3G phones in order to play online games?
In Greece, obviously, they'll just arrest the nearest bar manager, while in London's West End we foresee a variation on traffic wardens slapping Internetting Tickets on careless mobile gamers...
FAT EUGENIA FAT FAT LARD FAT PORCINE CORPULENT CELLULITE RIDDEN FAT
'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' Rolls on
Wed Aug 14, 3:23 PM ET
By ANTHONY BREZNICAN, AP Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) - In a summer of huge movies that last just a few weeks in theaters and are lucky to break even, one little film won't quit.
Photo
AP Photo
The celebration has lasted all summer for "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," a micro-budgeted romantic comedy with great word-of-mouth that has steadily climbed from 20th place on the box-office chart to No. 8 last weekend.
The film, about a woman who defies the traditions of her loud Greek family by marrying a man who isn't Greek, cost only about $5 million to produce. It has collected nearly $45 million since it's April debut, and the end of the honeymoon is nowhere in sight.
"I feel like I connected with absolute strangers across America. That's what I love more than anything," said Nia Vardalos, the star and writer, who adapted the film from her one-woman stage show.
"The money is like, 'Yeah, yeah.'
Vardalos, 39, said she had thought the film would cover its cost and maybe turn a small profit. "I thought I could just die happy that I made a Greek-American movie and I actually got to star in it and that's it," she said.
While "Men in Black II" and "Minority Report" have earned three times as much as Vardalos' film, they also cost about 20 times more to produce. Once marketing costs are factored in, those movies will likely show a profit only on home video.
By comparison, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," playing in only 723 theaters, continues to add screens and draw packed houses. Brian Fuson, box-office analyst for The Hollywood Reporter, said it could hold a spot in the top 10 for several more weeks.
"It was a slow roll-out, a few more theaters each week, building its way up," said Fuson. "It's basically what every small independent film hopes will happen."
The project developed after actor Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, who is Greek-American, saw Vardalos' Los Angeles stage play in 1998. They liked it so much that Hanks purchased the rights through his production company, Playtone Co., and agreed to let Vardalos adapt the story and take the starring role.
Other producers had shown interest in the story, but most wanted to change the family's ethnicity to Hispanic or Italian, saying Greeks wouldn't resonate with mainstream audiences, Vardalos said.
"They came to me and said, 'We saw your play,' and it's almost like the subtext was: 'And now we're gonna wreck it,'" Vardalos said. "They said, 'Greek, Italian it's the same, isn't it?'"
The difference may just be the details baklava vs. cannoli but Vardalos wanted to express pride in her heritage while poking fun at universal idiosyncrasies: prying parents, overprotective brothers, oddball aunts and uncles, and the ritualistic force-feeding found at big family gatherings.
Raised in Winnipeg, Canada, Vardalos started her career studying musical theater and worked in the box office of the Second City comedy troupe in Chicago. When one of the actors missed a performance one night, she filled in because she knew all the lines.
The next day, the group hired her as a performer, and the rest played out like a Hollywood movie: Among the Second City performers was her future husband, Ian Gomez, who appears in the movie as her fiance's best friend.
Her own traditional Greek wedding full of boisterous relatives, oodles of food and the grudging fusion of cultures inspired her stage act.
She is considering a sequel set in Greece, perhaps something along the lines of "My Big Fat Greek Honeymoon," and has received numerous other acting offers.
Vardalos is reluctant to specify future plans or take a guess at her movie's final box-office take. She doesn't want to jinx anything.
"I'm a Greek tragedian, so we're scared of stuff like that," she said.
Prince wonders, 'How long, however, b4 a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, 2 leave the system 4 good? How long b4 a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and r careful not 2 get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long b4 a critical mass of art lovers get 2gether 2 provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the xisting system artistically irrelevant?'
I think we all know of Prince's fondess for symbols over proper words ever since he did that thing with his name but that quote is really going over the top!
GMD
watch this
How long before people learn that "haxor talk" is a panty ass way of fitting in?
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