Well.. This is/. after all. It's certainly mean, but from a geek's perspective it's an obvious fake. Now if it were a brilliant link like this that would be fun and cool.
Here's the thing. When you (the government) wish to infringe on a citizen's right to privacy, you need a warrant. It's this weird thing the US is based on... starts "We the People" or something like that... So yeah, you need a warrant every time you do that.
I don't put much stock in conspiracy theories, but it seems like the only reason this simple FISA process would be too cumbersome is if you're running computer-based analysis on thousands if not hundreds of thousands of phone calls and hoping to find a needle in a haystack. The problem with this or any kind of wiretapping is that criminals/terrorists have conversations that probably sound more like little Jimmy talking to grandma than the real Jimmy talking to grandma.
"Hey honey, I'm heading to the grocery store, what do you need me to pick up for dinner?" could mean "I'm going to make my monthly run to the bomb component store, what do you need?". Then the other person on the line (a female, to make things seem even more innocuous) says "Well, we need some milk, eggs, bread, and cheese" which means "gasoline, shrapnel, etc i have no idea what goes into bombs". But you get the point.
It seems the only real use of this power is to monitor non-criminals/non-terrorists, since the real ones are expecting to be monitored and will never reveal anything useful.
And as with any automated system there will be those that learn it and game it. If some shoplifters learn the behaviors that trigger a false positive, then they could have a couple buddies launch a diversion, doing things that would cause a false positive but not really stealing, while a third actually steals something knowing the eyes in the sky won't be looking at them.
When you see a fantastic looking woman while out shopping, when you get close enough so that you can see she is even more beautiful, when you get there and see by her face or mannerisms that she is probably underage you do not (I suspect) suddenly feel awful. I suspect you get a few more thoughts about innocence, beauty, and purity. Fortunately thoughts like those are then (hopefully) followed by thoughts of inappropriate because the current legal system prevents this.
Not to distort your meaning, but if the law didn't say that it would be fine? I don't think being physically mature shares a strong correlation with emotional or mental maturity. And it seems like within our current educational system and our media's decision to appeal to the lowest common denominator we are maturing slower than slower in these regards.
I always thought AWSD sucked. It sucks because you can't use your pinky to hit anything (if like me you use your ring, middle, and pointer fingers for the ASD keys respectively). Now obviously you could use your pinky, ring, and middle fingers for ASD but your pinky isn't very dexterous compared to the other fingers mentioned.
BUT, if you change the mappings of AWSD to SEDF then you can assign A to be something useful (like crouch), and you can also hit Q and Z pretty easily while in the middle of circle-strafing or whatever.
And to bring this back around to slashdot, I just learned about the key bindings here so I'm about to go change AWSD to SEDF if I can because then I can keep my fingers where they normally are when typing without having to use my pitifully un-dexterous pinky to go left.
Wow you're right... I hadn't thought about it this way before but I may not be able to get off the couch to swap disks every once in a while.. HOW SHALL I ENDURE THIS CURSE!?
I've played Ass Creed (i like many things about this game, but the over-repetitiveness of the story structure deserves the abbreviation) on both ps3 and 360 and it looks great and plays smoothly on both.
Is this really required? Are so many voters so stupid that they've bought into all the fear? Maybe I'm rolling with a very atypical crew, but most people I know have not bought into the fear.
Yeah... We might have to live with our current, crappy 720p/1080i HDTV and not upgrade to "full HD" of 1080p which oops actually now you need 1440p cause anything less sucks and is like living in the dark ages.
I say let consumer goods skyrocket in price and maybe people will learn that they can still enjoy life after they step off the never ending upgrade treadmill.
Truman (to President): "Well, our object collison budget's about a million dollars. That allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and begging your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky."
"The ability to chop up 3 planets and turn them into 20 while changing their orbits and creating some cool moons around them is insignificant next to the power of the force."
You're right, I did forget about the TV. I think I used to be a much more serious gamer, both with consoles and PC, and I really liked the mouse controls of the PC for running and shooting games like counterstrike. But lots of factors such as getting busy with other things and moving into a smaller apt made me want less and less to have a desktop system and made it more and more logical for me to get a nextgen/currentgen console and stick with that.
I don't think consoles or PCs are in any danger of going away anytime soon. Both are two ways of playing games and doing other things too, and it all comes down to what you like:)
Oh, and thanks for correcting me on the costs, too, cause for the 360 or PS3 to have a shot at PC game quality you really gotta have an HDTV, and that does increase the price by a lot.
...that an Xbox 360 pro (HDMI, hard disk, wireless controller) only costs $350 USD and already includes everything you need to play games. Your $200 card, $300 CPU will also need a case, mobo, RAM, keyboard, mouse, and now you're at $800 or so to "trounce" whatever the consoles can provide.
I think a lot of people just don't have the time to set up and maintain a rig anymore or they just don't want to go through the hassle, and contrary to the way things were in the N64/PS1-2 days consoles really don't seem that far behind PCs anymore but the prices are still way cheaper.
"I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small!"
I don't think this is a fault of privatization but of the company that took over this zoo. What good did it do them to cut corners? Now people are afraid to go to the zoo and the company will lose money and maybe go out of business. It doesn't help to cut corners in the long run and good businesses know that. The free market reacts to business in this way and thus regulates it.
But I do agree that lots of private companies don't care enough since they are driven entirely by profit and don't think about safety as much as they should until it's too late.
Slashdot Mirror
It's possible Blizzard is trying to cash in on the WoW fan base although I really hope that's not true..
Well.. This is /. after all. It's certainly mean, but from a geek's perspective it's an obvious fake. Now if it were a brilliant link like this that would be fun and cool.
I guess it's made to educate all the people that don't hover over a suspect link and check the actual destination in their status bar. Nifty.
Here's the thing. When you (the government) wish to infringe on a citizen's right to privacy, you need a warrant. It's this weird thing the US is based on... starts "We the People" or something like that... So yeah, you need a warrant every time you do that.
I don't put much stock in conspiracy theories, but it seems like the only reason this simple FISA process would be too cumbersome is if you're running computer-based analysis on thousands if not hundreds of thousands of phone calls and hoping to find a needle in a haystack. The problem with this or any kind of wiretapping is that criminals/terrorists have conversations that probably sound more like little Jimmy talking to grandma than the real Jimmy talking to grandma.
"Hey honey, I'm heading to the grocery store, what do you need me to pick up for dinner?" could mean "I'm going to make my monthly run to the bomb component store, what do you need?". Then the other person on the line (a female, to make things seem even more innocuous) says "Well, we need some milk, eggs, bread, and cheese" which means "gasoline, shrapnel, etc i have no idea what goes into bombs". But you get the point.
It seems the only real use of this power is to monitor non-criminals/non-terrorists, since the real ones are expecting to be monitored and will never reveal anything useful.
And as with any automated system there will be those that learn it and game it. If some shoplifters learn the behaviors that trigger a false positive, then they could have a couple buddies launch a diversion, doing things that would cause a false positive but not really stealing, while a third actually steals something knowing the eyes in the sky won't be looking at them.
When you see a fantastic looking woman while out shopping, when you get close enough so that you can see she is even more beautiful, when you get there and see by her face or mannerisms that she is probably underage you do not (I suspect) suddenly feel awful. I suspect you get a few more thoughts about innocence, beauty, and purity. Fortunately thoughts like those are then (hopefully) followed by thoughts of inappropriate because the current legal system prevents this.
Not to distort your meaning, but if the law didn't say that it would be fine? I don't think being physically mature shares a strong correlation with emotional or mental maturity. And it seems like within our current educational system and our media's decision to appeal to the lowest common denominator we are maturing slower than slower in these regards.
Nah, once he upgraded to 9600 baud it was impossible to read as fast as it would stream..
I always thought AWSD sucked. It sucks because you can't use your pinky to hit anything (if like me you use your ring, middle, and pointer fingers for the ASD keys respectively). Now obviously you could use your pinky, ring, and middle fingers for ASD but your pinky isn't very dexterous compared to the other fingers mentioned.
BUT, if you change the mappings of AWSD to SEDF then you can assign A to be something useful (like crouch), and you can also hit Q and Z pretty easily while in the middle of circle-strafing or whatever.
And to bring this back around to slashdot, I just learned about the key bindings here so I'm about to go change AWSD to SEDF if I can because then I can keep my fingers where they normally are when typing without having to use my pitifully un-dexterous pinky to go left.
Wow you're right... I hadn't thought about it this way before but I may not be able to get off the couch to swap disks every once in a while.. HOW SHALL I ENDURE THIS CURSE!?
I've played Ass Creed (i like many things about this game, but the over-repetitiveness of the story structure deserves the abbreviation) on both ps3 and 360 and it looks great and plays smoothly on both.
...it probably is.
Common Sense 101 - I guess a lot of kids missed that class because their parents kept them at home due to fear of terr-a-wrists.
Is this really required? Are so many voters so stupid that they've bought into all the fear? Maybe I'm rolling with a very atypical crew, but most people I know have not bought into the fear.
Yeah... We might have to live with our current, crappy 720p/1080i HDTV and not upgrade to "full HD" of 1080p which oops actually now you need 1440p cause anything less sucks and is like living in the dark ages.
I say let consumer goods skyrocket in price and maybe people will learn that they can still enjoy life after they step off the never ending upgrade treadmill.
Truman (to President): "Well, our object collison budget's about a million dollars. That allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and begging your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky."
You are assuming that the people who decide what is allowed and what is not allowed are:
1) able to figure out what makes people safer and what doesn't, and
2) actually desire people to be safer
I can think of a lot of reasons that 1 and possibly 2 would not always be true.
I must be missing something... So being robbed, raped, kidnapped, etc by a knife-wielder is better than the same by a gun-wielder?
"The ability to chop up 3 planets and turn them into 20 while changing their orbits and creating some cool moons around them is insignificant next to the power of the force."
You're right, I did forget about the TV. I think I used to be a much more serious gamer, both with consoles and PC, and I really liked the mouse controls of the PC for running and shooting games like counterstrike. But lots of factors such as getting busy with other things and moving into a smaller apt made me want less and less to have a desktop system and made it more and more logical for me to get a nextgen/currentgen console and stick with that.
:)
I don't think consoles or PCs are in any danger of going away anytime soon. Both are two ways of playing games and doing other things too, and it all comes down to what you like
Oh, and thanks for correcting me on the costs, too, cause for the 360 or PS3 to have a shot at PC game quality you really gotta have an HDTV, and that does increase the price by a lot.
...that an Xbox 360 pro (HDMI, hard disk, wireless controller) only costs $350 USD and already includes everything you need to play games. Your $200 card, $300 CPU will also need a case, mobo, RAM, keyboard, mouse, and now you're at $800 or so to "trounce" whatever the consoles can provide.
I think a lot of people just don't have the time to set up and maintain a rig anymore or they just don't want to go through the hassle, and contrary to the way things were in the N64/PS1-2 days consoles really don't seem that far behind PCs anymore but the prices are still way cheaper.
"I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different.
I chose the impossible. I chose...Rapture,
a city where the artist would not fear the censor,
where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality,
Where the great would not be constrained by the small!"
-Andrew Ryan
agree 100% kind of scary when you think about how incapable most people would be of surviving without our modern conveniences.
I don't think this is a fault of privatization but of the company that took over this zoo. What good did it do them to cut corners? Now people are afraid to go to the zoo and the company will lose money and maybe go out of business. It doesn't help to cut corners in the long run and good businesses know that. The free market reacts to business in this way and thus regulates it.
But I do agree that lots of private companies don't care enough since they are driven entirely by profit and don't think about safety as much as they should until it's too late.
i was going to point this out as well except it was such a crappy movie that i feared letting people know i saw it.
"How long have you been off the dose!?"
I'm off to practice my gun kata.