Interestingly one of my pet peeves with the original C&C as well as most RTS games is that they are way too easy for about 80% of the game and painfully hard for the remaining 20%, nothing like getting stuck halfway through a game because you just can't get past some ridiculously hard level (bonus points if it's one of those C&C trademark "fuck this strategy shit, let's just give the player two engineers and a commando" levels that are basically squad tactics and involve no large-scale strategy whatsoever).
Of course, most RTS games would fit better into the non-existent genre Realtime Tactics since that's what most of them are.
Oh well, at least the older games didn't focus so much on "LEVEL HAS STARTED HERE'S SOME ACTION AND EXPLOSIONS!!". If WWII had been like most RTS games are these days it would have consisted of all involved parties gathering in northeastern France and blowing each other to bits for three or four days.
Wow, that looks very odd, kind of like Photoshop on Windows but still not (disclaimer: I haven't used Photoshop on Windows since PS 7). I personally prefer the Photoshop on OS X approach, all the toolbars and palettes are invisible if no PS window is active, if a PS window is active then the toolbars are visible as well. (And more importantly, if you cmd-tab (alt-tab for you windows users) each toolbar isn't considered a separate window (favorite GIMP pet peeve)).
Who said anything about "freezer full of pot"? I sure didn't. I mentioned storing more than the "personal use" amount (around here that's around 50g unless it's split up in smaller bags then you get busted for dealing even if you bought it in 10g bags from a dealer).
As for storing it in a freezer, that's pretty common with larger amounts that you're not likely to use up right away since the inside of a freezer is dark and cold, something which tends to be a good thing if you don't want the cannabis to deteriorate.
And 200g (that's four times what it takes to be busted for "real" possession here) in a freezer isn't that much, assuming this is an adult couple, this is their cannabis for the next year, well that's just under 2g per week. Calling that a "serious addiction issue" is like saying two glasses of whiskey and six beers per week is "serious alcoholism".
Also, I doubt all that many people out there are actually physically addicted to cannabis (which is what most people mean when they talk about addiction, you could have meant "abuse" though which is different but it's still unlikely that most sane people would call less than 2g per week abuse).
Most states list pot possession under * (pick a number that's not unreasonable for a single day/week's personal, casual use) weight as simple possession (misdemeanor)
The problem with this is that a lot of older marijuana users who either grow their own or buy in "bulk" from growers (or dealers) will easily have a half year's consumption in their freezer and even if it's only say, 70g, the prosecutor will see an easy chance to bust them "with intent to distribute", makes for nice headlines and publicity.
Sure, the kids and college students might only have 5, 10 or 15g on them and will get away "easy" but anyone who doesn't like trying to get in touch with their dealer for hours while he's at someone's house playing video games will stock up.
The right that can be taken away after you've been convicted of a felony is the right to vote (and I think, but not sure) the right to run for public office.
I've never understood this about the US legal system, how can you take away a citizen's right to vote or run for office if he or she has been convicted of a crime? To me this seems very immoral, you are essentially removing one of the most fundamental rights a citizen has, the right to take part in the choosing of those who will be trusted to run the country, or to him-/herself volunteer to run the country(/town/state/county/whatever).
I actually used that one as a comment for a bit of code that sorted a dictionary in a language that supposedly doesn't allow sorting of dictionaries in any way (but I needed it sorted or code further down the line wouldn't give the desired output), once I was finished putting together a horrible hack that actually sorted the dictionary I left a// Here be dragons (do not edit unless you know why you're editing this) to warn anyone who might be tempted to "clean up" that particular piece of code.
Also pot will make you sterile (low sperm count) with excessive use.
Not really, this is an ancient myth and I dare you to find any reliable sources claiming this (no, government websites listing side-effects of cannabis are not "reliable sources", I mean actual references for research that has shown this).
Nice attempt to troll but that bit is getting old, try to give it a little freshness by perhaps giving examples (no matter how marginal and irrelevant) of how US states are more independent from the federal government than EU member states are from the EU.
This is not about propaganda and lies, this is about who's weapon systems the public considered more impressive and interesting which tends to be those of the winner. Of course, as time goes by people may start to develop more of an interest in the other side's systems, unless everyone just sort of plays along in the whole "their weapons sucked compared to ours".
Anyway, I'm rambling, the point was that "history is written by the victors" goes beyond just "...because they killed the losers" or "...because they forced everyone to accept their version of history at gunpoint".
You are either trolling or you don't understand the meaning of "history is written by the victors".
Even if you don't kill all your enemies and all who supported them in any way the winner still comes out on top with the loser subdued, guess which party is more powerful (hint: It's fucking obvious).
Also, just because there are books written on the subject doesn't mean they've received as much publicity as those describing the glorious victors (btw, this is the "guess which party is more powerful" bit in the previous paragraph.
Ah, but if Fedex was like greylisting it would not require registration (greylisting does not require you to register), instead they'd tell you that your package couldn't be delivered and if you ask them to send it again after an unknown period of time (sometimes a day or two (SMTP:a few seconds), sometimes a month (SMTPseveral hours) depending on what part of the country (SMTP:email server) you're in).
Proving you're a legit sender would be something more like SPF. You don't prove your legit just because you show up with your package (SMTP:mail) a second time.
Greylisting is just a game of hoping spambots never get clever enough to queue and resend, because the day that happens greylisting will become completely useless.
Properly-done greylisting isn't an inconvenience to anybody, because nobody notices it.
I've yet to see a greylisting solution that didn't have an initial wait that was long enough to be noticed.
A slight delay in receiving the first e-mail from a system is nothing, since you might not have been expecting that e-mail. In addition, even with a 4-minute initial delay (my choice in greylisting), mail to my domain is delayed less by greylisting than by whatever random outages afflict the Internet.
You're making assumptions about how people use email and concluding that since no one uses it differently from you then there is no problem.
Also, most emails sent to me through work email servers or my home email server tend to arrive a lot faster than in 4 minutes (a few seconds to a minute are most common from what I can tell).
As an aside, when did e-mail become "instant messaging", and when did "instant" become a requirement for all forms of communications, regardless of the importance?
Late 90's I believe, before then email was a bit hit or miss when it came to delivery times (and as late as the mid 90's you couldn't really rely on it arriving depending on what host you were emailing to, back then there were plenty of oddball mail servers that would just silently pipe the incoming messages straight into/dev/null if a user had exceeded his/her disk quota).
As for all forms of communication, well I'd say that these days "instant" is a lot more important than it used to be and when the standard is "real time or close enough to be indistinguishable from it" then that's what you have to strive for, imagine if Fedex started taking six months to deliver a package (but only for new customers and the customer would have to call them about the package at least once before it was delivered, to make sure the customer was serious about sending the package) while UPS, USPS and the others were still capable of overnight delivery, and imagine that they still advertised it as an overnight service, would you use Fedex after they spent six months delivering that first package?
However, how are you supposed to get that advice to , or even communicate reliably, with stubborn and/or stupid mail server admins? The problem most often is on the *other* side.
Indeed, I once had an issue with a Turkish ISP (forgot the name of them) that had some seriously misconfigured mail server that kept throwing a lot of traffic my way (thousands of junk bounces per day for several days while one of my domains (that has a proper SPF record setup btw) was getting joe-jobbed), I tried contacting them, explained the issue and in what way their server was misbehaving and got a reply back that could be summed up as "Why should we listen to you? You're just some spammer trying to mess with us!", I tried replying and once again explaining the issue at which point they threatened legal action if I didn't stop trying to spam their customers.
I considered using greylisting but the number one issue with greylisting for me is that it turns email from "arrives in 3 to 30 seconds" to "arrives in 3 seconds to 6 hours". Also, most greylisting setups I've had to deal with were kind of, for lack of a better description, wonky and paranoid ("You're not on our Good Guys(tm) list? REJECTED!"). I suppose greylisting is better than the horribly broken approach of rejecting incoming mail where reverse lookup doesn't match (e.g. email from somecompany.com which resolves to 10.x.x.x for which a reverse lookup returns x.x.x.10.cust.biz.someisp.net would be rejected because clearly this person is a spammer (or the ISP used by somecompany (someisp) doesn't allow proper reverse lookups without paying an extra $350 monthly "we want your money" fee)).
Personally (for my home server) I just rely on SpamAssassin and throwaway accounts (e.g. company@mydomain.tld) and I get a very minimal amount of spam (especially compared to outfits I've worked with that insisted on blacklist-only solutions).
You were using System 7 and you're complaining about it not networking properly with modern operating systems? You do realize that System 7 is from 1991, right?
Somehow I'm reminded of when I did a stint in tech support a few years ago and some guy called in having issues with getting his custom A1200T (custom as in, typical Amiga system where only the motherboard is actually an original component) to use certain features built into the ADSL CPE we had sent him...
I prefer using NFS since it fits better into an environment that is almost entirely *nix with the occasional windows box. Also, I've found NFS to have better performance and reliability than Samba.
MS still has that whole "Services for Unix" thing? I remember poking at that a bit when I wanted to get NFS (as a client) working under XP but I could never really get it working properly (read: at all), never had any problem with FreeBSD, Linux or OS X machines talking to the same NFS server though...
While I mostly agree with your post I would like to point out that I've met a few CS graduates, especially from "famous" schools, who have been in the habit of treating everyone else, including people who graduated from the same school as they did (sometimes even with with a Master's degree compared to their own Bachelor's) as if they knew nothing at all. This, of course, can get a bit silly when it's obvious that the stuck up person in question has a fairly limited understanding of whatever subject is being discussed (as an example their understanding of the web may be entirely in the context of ASP.NET+IIS or they've never used another database server than MSSQL (and thus no other SQL dialect than T-SQL). Yes, I'm implying that a lot of those who fall into this category tend to know only MS software and solutions since that's the most common scenario that I've seen).
The issue with this is of course that they tend to become "architecture astronauts" (as Joel Spolsky calls it) whenever they're trying to solve problems that the tools they know were never meant to solve, and this combined with the "well I've got a degree from $SCHOOL so I know more than you" attitude can cause some considerable friction.
How about taking the train? or the bus? or parking your car outside the dome (why would the parking spaces have to be inside the dome?) if you really really really need your precious penis enlarger? (the penis enlarger bit is definitely an accurate description for a lot of younger males around here who swear they "need" their car even though they somehow got around just fine using public transport just months earlier, apparently you become paralyzed the moment you get your license)
Sadly there is plenty of production code that uses Access databases for things they just shouldn't be used for, at a previous job I actually built several production websites that used Access as the db backend because the client didn't want to use MySQL (Open source is scary!) and they didn't want to pay for MSSQL...
Slashdot Mirror
*gives Kratisto nightly heroin injections for a few weeks just to see what happens*
What I meant was that most games that are called Realtime Strategy are actually Realtime Tactics.
/Mikae
Interestingly one of my pet peeves with the original C&C as well as most RTS games is that they are way too easy for about 80% of the game and painfully hard for the remaining 20%, nothing like getting stuck halfway through a game because you just can't get past some ridiculously hard level (bonus points if it's one of those C&C trademark "fuck this strategy shit, let's just give the player two engineers and a commando" levels that are basically squad tactics and involve no large-scale strategy whatsoever).
Of course, most RTS games would fit better into the non-existent genre Realtime Tactics since that's what most of them are.
Oh well, at least the older games didn't focus so much on "LEVEL HAS STARTED HERE'S SOME ACTION AND EXPLOSIONS!!". If WWII had been like most RTS games are these days it would have consisted of all involved parties gathering in northeastern France and blowing each other to bits for three or four days.
/Mikael
Wow, that looks very odd, kind of like Photoshop on Windows but still not (disclaimer: I haven't used Photoshop on Windows since PS 7). I personally prefer the Photoshop on OS X approach, all the toolbars and palettes are invisible if no PS window is active, if a PS window is active then the toolbars are visible as well. (And more importantly, if you cmd-tab (alt-tab for you windows users) each toolbar isn't considered a separate window (favorite GIMP pet peeve)).
/Mikael
Who said anything about "freezer full of pot"? I sure didn't. I mentioned storing more than the "personal use" amount (around here that's around 50g unless it's split up in smaller bags then you get busted for dealing even if you bought it in 10g bags from a dealer).
As for storing it in a freezer, that's pretty common with larger amounts that you're not likely to use up right away since the inside of a freezer is dark and cold, something which tends to be a good thing if you don't want the cannabis to deteriorate.
And 200g (that's four times what it takes to be busted for "real" possession here) in a freezer isn't that much, assuming this is an adult couple, this is their cannabis for the next year, well that's just under 2g per week. Calling that a "serious addiction issue" is like saying two glasses of whiskey and six beers per week is "serious alcoholism".
Also, I doubt all that many people out there are actually physically addicted to cannabis (which is what most people mean when they talk about addiction, you could have meant "abuse" though which is different but it's still unlikely that most sane people would call less than 2g per week abuse).
/Mikael
So why hasn't the law against mexica^H^H^H^H^H^Hcannabis been overturned by the supreme court yet?
/Mikael
Most states list pot possession under * (pick a number that's not unreasonable for a single day/week's personal, casual use) weight as simple possession (misdemeanor)
The problem with this is that a lot of older marijuana users who either grow their own or buy in "bulk" from growers (or dealers) will easily have a half year's consumption in their freezer and even if it's only say, 70g, the prosecutor will see an easy chance to bust them "with intent to distribute", makes for nice headlines and publicity.
Sure, the kids and college students might only have 5, 10 or 15g on them and will get away "easy" but anyone who doesn't like trying to get in touch with their dealer for hours while he's at someone's house playing video games will stock up.
/Mikael
The right that can be taken away after you've been convicted of a felony is the right to vote (and I think, but not sure) the right to run for public office.
I've never understood this about the US legal system, how can you take away a citizen's right to vote or run for office if he or she has been convicted of a crime? To me this seems very immoral, you are essentially removing one of the most fundamental rights a citizen has, the right to take part in the choosing of those who will be trusted to run the country, or to him-/herself volunteer to run the country(/town/state/county/whatever).
/Mikael
I actually used that one as a comment for a bit of code that sorted a dictionary in a language that supposedly doesn't allow sorting of dictionaries in any way (but I needed it sorted or code further down the line wouldn't give the desired output), once I was finished putting together a horrible hack that actually sorted the dictionary I left a // Here be dragons (do not edit unless you know why you're editing this) to warn anyone who might be tempted to "clean up" that particular piece of code.
/Mikael
Also pot will make you sterile (low sperm count) with excessive use.
Not really, this is an ancient myth and I dare you to find any reliable sources claiming this (no, government websites listing side-effects of cannabis are not "reliable sources", I mean actual references for research that has shown this).
/Mikael
Nice attempt to troll but that bit is getting old, try to give it a little freshness by perhaps giving examples (no matter how marginal and irrelevant) of how US states are more independent from the federal government than EU member states are from the EU.
/Mikael
This is not about propaganda and lies, this is about who's weapon systems the public considered more impressive and interesting which tends to be those of the winner. Of course, as time goes by people may start to develop more of an interest in the other side's systems, unless everyone just sort of plays along in the whole "their weapons sucked compared to ours".
Anyway, I'm rambling, the point was that "history is written by the victors" goes beyond just "...because they killed the losers" or "...because they forced everyone to accept their version of history at gunpoint".
/Mikael
You are either trolling or you don't understand the meaning of "history is written by the victors".
Even if you don't kill all your enemies and all who supported them in any way the winner still comes out on top with the loser subdued, guess which party is more powerful (hint: It's fucking obvious).
Also, just because there are books written on the subject doesn't mean they've received as much publicity as those describing the glorious victors (btw, this is the "guess which party is more powerful" bit in the previous paragraph.
/Mikael
Ah, but if Fedex was like greylisting it would not require registration (greylisting does not require you to register), instead they'd tell you that your package couldn't be delivered and if you ask them to send it again after an unknown period of time (sometimes a day or two (SMTP:a few seconds), sometimes a month (SMTPseveral hours) depending on what part of the country (SMTP:email server) you're in).
Proving you're a legit sender would be something more like SPF. You don't prove your legit just because you show up with your package (SMTP:mail) a second time.
Greylisting is just a game of hoping spambots never get clever enough to queue and resend, because the day that happens greylisting will become completely useless.
/Mikael
Properly-done greylisting isn't an inconvenience to anybody, because nobody notices it.
I've yet to see a greylisting solution that didn't have an initial wait that was long enough to be noticed.
A slight delay in receiving the first e-mail from a system is nothing, since you might not have been expecting that e-mail. In addition, even with a 4-minute initial delay (my choice in greylisting), mail to my domain is delayed less by greylisting than by whatever random outages afflict the Internet.
You're making assumptions about how people use email and concluding that since no one uses it differently from you then there is no problem.
Also, most emails sent to me through work email servers or my home email server tend to arrive a lot faster than in 4 minutes (a few seconds to a minute are most common from what I can tell).
As an aside, when did e-mail become "instant messaging", and when did "instant" become a requirement for all forms of communications, regardless of the importance?
Late 90's I believe, before then email was a bit hit or miss when it came to delivery times (and as late as the mid 90's you couldn't really rely on it arriving depending on what host you were emailing to, back then there were plenty of oddball mail servers that would just silently pipe the incoming messages straight into /dev/null if a user had exceeded his/her disk quota).
As for all forms of communication, well I'd say that these days "instant" is a lot more important than it used to be and when the standard is "real time or close enough to be indistinguishable from it" then that's what you have to strive for, imagine if Fedex started taking six months to deliver a package (but only for new customers and the customer would have to call them about the package at least once before it was delivered, to make sure the customer was serious about sending the package) while UPS, USPS and the others were still capable of overnight delivery, and imagine that they still advertised it as an overnight service, would you use Fedex after they spent six months delivering that first package?
/Mikael
However, how are you supposed to get that advice to , or even communicate reliably, with stubborn and/or stupid mail server admins? The problem most often is on the *other* side.
Indeed, I once had an issue with a Turkish ISP (forgot the name of them) that had some seriously misconfigured mail server that kept throwing a lot of traffic my way (thousands of junk bounces per day for several days while one of my domains (that has a proper SPF record setup btw) was getting joe-jobbed), I tried contacting them, explained the issue and in what way their server was misbehaving and got a reply back that could be summed up as "Why should we listen to you? You're just some spammer trying to mess with us!", I tried replying and once again explaining the issue at which point they threatened legal action if I didn't stop trying to spam their customers.
/Mikael
You're assuming that everyone doing greylisting is doing it "properly" and even then it's an inconvenience.
/Mikael
I considered using greylisting but the number one issue with greylisting for me is that it turns email from "arrives in 3 to 30 seconds" to "arrives in 3 seconds to 6 hours". Also, most greylisting setups I've had to deal with were kind of, for lack of a better description, wonky and paranoid ("You're not on our Good Guys(tm) list? REJECTED!"). I suppose greylisting is better than the horribly broken approach of rejecting incoming mail where reverse lookup doesn't match (e.g. email from somecompany.com which resolves to 10.x.x.x for which a reverse lookup returns x.x.x.10.cust.biz.someisp.net would be rejected because clearly this person is a spammer (or the ISP used by somecompany (someisp) doesn't allow proper reverse lookups without paying an extra $350 monthly "we want your money" fee)).
Personally (for my home server) I just rely on SpamAssassin and throwaway accounts (e.g. company@mydomain.tld) and I get a very minimal amount of spam (especially compared to outfits I've worked with that insisted on blacklist-only solutions).
/Mikael
Can't we just leave all the assholes? I suspect the amount of people we'd have to transport to Mars would be a lot smaller.
/Mikael
You were using System 7 and you're complaining about it not networking properly with modern operating systems? You do realize that System 7 is from 1991, right?
Somehow I'm reminded of when I did a stint in tech support a few years ago and some guy called in having issues with getting his custom A1200T (custom as in, typical Amiga system where only the motherboard is actually an original component) to use certain features built into the ADSL CPE we had sent him...
/Mikael
I prefer using NFS since it fits better into an environment that is almost entirely *nix with the occasional windows box. Also, I've found NFS to have better performance and reliability than Samba.
/Mikael
MS still has that whole "Services for Unix" thing? I remember poking at that a bit when I wanted to get NFS (as a client) working under XP but I could never really get it working properly (read: at all), never had any problem with FreeBSD, Linux or OS X machines talking to the same NFS server though...
/Mikael
While I mostly agree with your post I would like to point out that I've met a few CS graduates, especially from "famous" schools, who have been in the habit of treating everyone else, including people who graduated from the same school as they did (sometimes even with with a Master's degree compared to their own Bachelor's) as if they knew nothing at all. This, of course, can get a bit silly when it's obvious that the stuck up person in question has a fairly limited understanding of whatever subject is being discussed (as an example their understanding of the web may be entirely in the context of ASP.NET+IIS or they've never used another database server than MSSQL (and thus no other SQL dialect than T-SQL). Yes, I'm implying that a lot of those who fall into this category tend to know only MS software and solutions since that's the most common scenario that I've seen).
The issue with this is of course that they tend to become "architecture astronauts" (as Joel Spolsky calls it) whenever they're trying to solve problems that the tools they know were never meant to solve, and this combined with the "well I've got a degree from $SCHOOL so I know more than you" attitude can cause some considerable friction.
/Mikael
How about taking the train? or the bus? or parking your car outside the dome (why would the parking spaces have to be inside the dome?) if you really really really need your precious penis enlarger? (the penis enlarger bit is definitely an accurate description for a lot of younger males around here who swear they "need" their car even though they somehow got around just fine using public transport just months earlier, apparently you become paralyzed the moment you get your license)
/Mikael
Sadly there is plenty of production code that uses Access databases for things they just shouldn't be used for, at a previous job I actually built several production websites that used Access as the db backend because the client didn't want to use MySQL (Open source is scary!) and they didn't want to pay for MSSQL...
/Mikael