Now that we're taken care of child molesters we'll focus our attention on those who molest pixels. To graps the scale of the number of abused, mistreated and permanently scarred pixels all you need is a visit to myspace.. Those people should be doing hard time I say!
Make a boot loader that plays islamic religious songs and displays a three minute countdown in big red digits in addition some arabic text. The bigger and older the laptop the better the effect.
The only problem with this little trick is that there's a high chance you'd be offered a free and unconditional tour of one of the US military facilities along with a hands-on waterboarding demonstration.
Well both legal companies and the russian malware mafia work on pretty much the same basis.
If you break any other EULA, you get a letter.
If you break the their EULA, you get a package.
I'm not sure if anybody mentioned it, but it's 100% fullproof and very, very simple.
Pay any company to laser-etch a note on the body of the laptop in two places. One being the upper cover and reading "This laptop belongs to John Doe and is not for sale" and a note under the battery or even on the underside saying "If someone's offering to sell this laptop, then it's stolen. Contact me at admin@pentagon.gov"
It will look odd, but a laptop with your name and a note saying it's not for sale is hard to sell on the market and is very easily identifiable.
For an added bonus you could stuff the insides of the laptop with drugs. Just the right amount for dogs to sniff it out, along with a note inside. You probably wouldn't get your laptop back but the people who stole it would have one hell of a time.
And the ideas with the explosives are so dumb yet so tempting. I say, I would actually pay to see a thief waving torn pieces of meat hanging from where his hands used to be.
I know plenty of coders who are perfectly normal people , in fact I don't think I've ever met one who was the alleged stereotype aspergers and I only ever met one who I'd have called socially stunted. That only goes to show we've learned to act normal for a time quite well. Nobody said we're stupid. Socially illiterate is another thing..
As for there being few black coders, not very surprising. White people usually got the better payed positions - I'm not sure if it was for objective or subjective reasons and I don't really care. A stereotypical geek is white ( white and nerdy, oh yeah ) so there's probably less peer pressure for white geeks than black geeks. Not that geeks would by definition give a shit but still..
We're slowly approaching the point where we can't reasonably waste any more cycles on basic tasks and call it "clean implementation" or "advanced under-the-hood features".
We may have stopped optimizing software. We may have stopped using ASM and dirty hacks in favor of embedded python interpreter engines and memory-managed objects. But the truth is even with all that nifty stuff, you don't need very much computing power or memory to do certain tasks.
Why Microsoft has churned out so many Office suites is truly interesting. Most people use a tiny subset of the features therein, and you'd be hard pressed to find people who are forced to use the newest and latest versions of Word because the, say, 97 version lacks the functionality they need. This group would, I assume, be so very small, that designing a software product the size of Office for them alone wouldn't get even close to returning the investment. Note I'm not talking about an office version that implements the new open document standard.
But people are slowly catching up, and while our bleeding edge pimped workstations/home PCs have the power of a small supercomputer, we realize we don't really need a 9800GX2 just to place a bid on ebay and that for the majority of things you can do on a PC a low-end machine will suffice. The other things, such as playing 3d games, designing graphics or hosting a MySQL server are, out of physical size, dimension and user experience reasons, impractical to do on a laptop anyway.
I'm pretty certain that even once this fad will be over, there will still be a huge number of people who'll be using ultraportable budget laptops, just because PDAs and cell phones suck at being real computers.
Seriously, don't these schmucks have anything better to do? Every week its another half assed invention... its either fear mongering or more fear mongering. Seriously, I've got a running bet with a friend that eventually people will actually get fed up... and that is when I hope to still have a working cam corder, because the video footage will be PRICELESS! A lot of enforcers are gonna have a tough time staying healthy once the food gets expensive, especially once the homeless mobs in the big cities realize that they've nothing left to lose. Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
The world isn't real or even close, but the time used to gain those virtual items is. Notice the difference?
Your comparison to scrabble is flawed. When you buy scrabble, you can play by your rules. It's your game, your piece of paper, your blocks. If you want a more accurate comparison envision the author of scrabble forcing his way into your house, taking your scrabble board, kicking the blocks off the board, taking a dump on it, dousing it in gasoline and lighting it, shouting "We regretfully inform you that your game has been permanently suspended due to the violation of the EULA on grounds of cheating!!"
Of course it's not the real world but just how close it is depends on your criteria. A lot of people become so immersed for all they could care the real world could cease to exist. But then again, not every player is a wow junkie. What matters though is that you have a character that you develop, spend time playing, getting gear, skills or whatever. From a legal standpoint you don't own anything and the company, if it wishes to, may go ahead and nerf you back to level one, strip you of all your gear or simply ban you without as much as giving you a reason. There's no law that governs the virtual world, or gives you any rights whatsoever to your virtual property, vitual items or avatars. Even if that ultrarare artifact is just virtual, a collection of bits, the months of your time spent levelling, planning, raiding are very, very real.
"If you don't like the rules why play it?"
I don't, I never did and I never will.
WoW and other MMORPGs create a virtual world that is increasingly similar to the one we live in. Those worlds are evolving in all but one aspect - the law. Did you ever notice that when you do something the company doesn't like, your character is executed without second thoughts? The company is the prosecutor, the defendant and the judge in one entity. You don't even have a chance to be present at the trial. Suddenly all your characters are terminated from the virtual world, without a chance to explain that, for example, you were using a programmable keyboard which the manufacturer recommended specifically the game you're being banned from. I find it deliciously ironic that the tables have turned and now Blizzard, the quite ruthless and totalitarian demi-god of their virtual world can only watch as a lone man taunts them from outside their zone of influence. The same lack of laws that allow Blizzard and other companies to dispose of uncomfortable players at a rate that would make even Saddam blush give them little power in the real world.
Damn. If I, for whatever reason, will be forced to visit the US, I'll make a custom boot sequence on my laptop.
It'd go something like this:
Primer.. Green
PETN charge (50g).. Green
VX gas pressure.. Green
Anti-tampering.. Green
Along with a hollywood-stylized bomb counter with some arabic text and a password box "Type password to deactivate".
If I wouldn't die from being tasered I'd probably die from laughter.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that we're taken care of child molesters we'll focus our attention on those who molest pixels. To graps the scale of the number of abused, mistreated and permanently scarred pixels all you need is a visit to myspace.. Those people should be doing hard time I say!
Please go on kind sir, I will just sit here humbly and make notes.
Make a boot loader that plays islamic religious songs and displays a three minute countdown in big red digits in addition some arabic text. The bigger and older the laptop the better the effect. The only problem with this little trick is that there's a high chance you'd be offered a free and unconditional tour of one of the US military facilities along with a hands-on waterboarding demonstration.
Well both legal companies and the russian malware mafia work on pretty much the same basis. If you break any other EULA, you get a letter. If you break the their EULA, you get a package.
I'm not sure if anybody mentioned it, but it's 100% fullproof and very, very simple. Pay any company to laser-etch a note on the body of the laptop in two places. One being the upper cover and reading "This laptop belongs to John Doe and is not for sale" and a note under the battery or even on the underside saying "If someone's offering to sell this laptop, then it's stolen. Contact me at admin@pentagon.gov" It will look odd, but a laptop with your name and a note saying it's not for sale is hard to sell on the market and is very easily identifiable. For an added bonus you could stuff the insides of the laptop with drugs. Just the right amount for dogs to sniff it out, along with a note inside. You probably wouldn't get your laptop back but the people who stole it would have one hell of a time. And the ideas with the explosives are so dumb yet so tempting. I say, I would actually pay to see a thief waving torn pieces of meat hanging from where his hands used to be.
We're slowly approaching the point where we can't reasonably waste any more cycles on basic tasks and call it "clean implementation" or "advanced under-the-hood features". We may have stopped optimizing software. We may have stopped using ASM and dirty hacks in favor of embedded python interpreter engines and memory-managed objects. But the truth is even with all that nifty stuff, you don't need very much computing power or memory to do certain tasks. Why Microsoft has churned out so many Office suites is truly interesting. Most people use a tiny subset of the features therein, and you'd be hard pressed to find people who are forced to use the newest and latest versions of Word because the, say, 97 version lacks the functionality they need. This group would, I assume, be so very small, that designing a software product the size of Office for them alone wouldn't get even close to returning the investment. Note I'm not talking about an office version that implements the new open document standard. But people are slowly catching up, and while our bleeding edge pimped workstations/home PCs have the power of a small supercomputer, we realize we don't really need a 9800GX2 just to place a bid on ebay and that for the majority of things you can do on a PC a low-end machine will suffice. The other things, such as playing 3d games, designing graphics or hosting a MySQL server are, out of physical size, dimension and user experience reasons, impractical to do on a laptop anyway. I'm pretty certain that even once this fad will be over, there will still be a huge number of people who'll be using ultraportable budget laptops, just because PDAs and cell phones suck at being real computers.
The world isn't real or even close, but the time used to gain those virtual items is. Notice the difference? Your comparison to scrabble is flawed. When you buy scrabble, you can play by your rules. It's your game, your piece of paper, your blocks. If you want a more accurate comparison envision the author of scrabble forcing his way into your house, taking your scrabble board, kicking the blocks off the board, taking a dump on it, dousing it in gasoline and lighting it, shouting "We regretfully inform you that your game has been permanently suspended due to the violation of the EULA on grounds of cheating!!"
Of course it's not the real world but just how close it is depends on your criteria. A lot of people become so immersed for all they could care the real world could cease to exist. But then again, not every player is a wow junkie. What matters though is that you have a character that you develop, spend time playing, getting gear, skills or whatever. From a legal standpoint you don't own anything and the company, if it wishes to, may go ahead and nerf you back to level one, strip you of all your gear or simply ban you without as much as giving you a reason. There's no law that governs the virtual world, or gives you any rights whatsoever to your virtual property, vitual items or avatars. Even if that ultrarare artifact is just virtual, a collection of bits, the months of your time spent levelling, planning, raiding are very, very real. "If you don't like the rules why play it?" I don't, I never did and I never will.
WoW and other MMORPGs create a virtual world that is increasingly similar to the one we live in. Those worlds are evolving in all but one aspect - the law. Did you ever notice that when you do something the company doesn't like, your character is executed without second thoughts? The company is the prosecutor, the defendant and the judge in one entity. You don't even have a chance to be present at the trial. Suddenly all your characters are terminated from the virtual world, without a chance to explain that, for example, you were using a programmable keyboard which the manufacturer recommended specifically the game you're being banned from. I find it deliciously ironic that the tables have turned and now Blizzard, the quite ruthless and totalitarian demi-god of their virtual world can only watch as a lone man taunts them from outside their zone of influence. The same lack of laws that allow Blizzard and other companies to dispose of uncomfortable players at a rate that would make even Saddam blush give them little power in the real world.
Damn. If I, for whatever reason, will be forced to visit the US, I'll make a custom boot sequence on my laptop. It'd go something like this: Primer.. Green PETN charge (50g).. Green VX gas pressure.. Green Anti-tampering.. Green Along with a hollywood-stylized bomb counter with some arabic text and a password box "Type password to deactivate". If I wouldn't die from being tasered I'd probably die from laughter.