I was just coming in to ask that exact question. Damn you Slashdotters for being so on the ball. It's absolutely mind boggling that the lawmakers don't see that as a potentially huge loophole in their attempts to keep propping up a dead business model.
When an act of terrorism causes instantaneous policy changes, then the terrorism worked and only serves to encourage others. The US government needs to stop being such a bunch of idiotic lolcows.
Since when do you need a supporting argument to back up that Americans are generally pretty braindead? Hell, just watch our nightly news and that's all the support you need. Most yanks live in a little bubble of society enforced self-delusion. That doesn't need an essay because that's just common knowledge.
I do have to admit I lol'd at excessive cursing. I haven't said a single thing that's "cursing." Sounds more like you're just a self-important twit who just happened to get some mod points for the month.
Lol, why the heck was I modded down troll? It's almost kind of ironic.
'Self & group deprecation won't win you friends across the pond.'
Whoever said I wanted to be friends with you? I live on a small island in Alaska for a reason. I'm sure my opening line may have made some yanks butthurt, but that doesn't keep it from being any less true, not to mention that the rest of my post was completely on topic.
Americans are a bunch of knee jerky reactionists that really are about as dense as a brick of lead, and that's coming from an American. So this story really isn't that surprising. Especially with how absolutely obsessive these stupid kids are with having tons of 'friends' on facebook. They'll add anyone they know just to feel like they aren't social pariahs. Why would you have your teachers on Facebook? They don't need to know a god damned thing about your personal life. It's hardly the first time we've heard of some dumbass with people added to their facebook that really shouldn't be there (like their boss).
Retards and technology, always a bad mix.
Yeah, basically. I use Windows only because I'm a gamer, not because I'm a Windows fanboy. If I could do serious gaming on Linux, I'd go with that, but that's not happening anytime soon. However, I will take every opportunity I can get to trashtalk Macs. God damned Fisher-Price my first computers.
Who cares about sales though? What are we, volunteer marketing and PR guys for Sony and Nintendo? Should we really be giving that much of a shit about who sells more?
If you're really going to use sales as a way to debate the merits and quality of a system, then by that logic the PC gaming market is truly a barren wasteland of absolute fail considering how consoles obliterate it.
Except some of us really do "try before we buy." My collection of purchased games is absolutely huge because I do believe in supporting the developers of good games. However, what's a guy to do when a game comes out with no demo eh?
Not all of us are grubby thieves here. Arrrr.
It's pretty much the only option we've got at this point, with the obvious exception being artists that are releasing their music themselves and actually get more than 2 cents and a pat on the back per album sold.
Well said good sir. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising just recently made this exact same retarded decision and payed for it with tons of canceled preorders and crap sales. At least the torrent speed for it was really good thanks to everyone not wanting to actually pay money for a game with gutted multiplayer.
The real joke to all of this is that I never play multiplayer games on the consoles for the sole reason that the multiplayer is always, without fail, completely terrible. Now they want to bring everything I hate about consoles to the PC. It's like they actually want us to pirate their crap.
I like how you concluded your argument by suggesting that I was advocating home treatments for every disease and malady in existence and that I was arguing that doctors are a waste of time. You really are doing your damndest to troll this up aren't you? Of course, you really could just be a moron, but whatever.
The fatality rate isn't unknown, the CDC has flat out been quoted as saying that it's only slightly higher than the regular flu.
Still only registering about 1/10. Try arguing less like a right wing pundit and more like someone with some brains next time, k?
Obvious troll is obvious. The only people who should be harassing doctors with this crap are the usual flu victims, kids, old people, and unusually frail people who should be taken in anyway REGARDLESS of it being h1n1 or not. And, oh wait, what's this?
"The 22-year-old patient's immune system had been weakened by Hodgkin's disease and chemotherapy"
I'm pretty sure that counts as "unusually frail people." 1/10 try again. You may want to try reading the article you're posting as a counter-argument before hitting submit next time.
Your average healthy adult just needs some bed rest, chicken soup, and OTC drugs.
I was at PAX and caught something, dunno what it was but I get feeling kind of crummy. Did I run out to a fucking doctor to find out if I had "TEH SWINE FLUES!?!?!?" No. Why? Cause there's absolute fuck all they can do.
I got home, bought some Nyquil, Aspirin, Halls, a gallon of OJ, and have been getting tons of rest. As of right now I feel way better and just have an annoying slightly plhegmy cough.
All these swine flu stories are total crap and need to stop being sensationalized. The doctor cannot help you so don't go out there and clog up the hospital with your uncurable crap. Go home, get someone to run out and buy you a cocktail of over the counter drugs, and sleep it off.
The lore to WoW could easily be made up into a fairly epic sized movie (otherwise, I'm sure they could just do an hour and a half of barrens chat acted out). However, I really don't think Sam Raimi is the best director for handling LotR sized events.
Damn, beat me to it. My first thought when I read the comment about using one of these sticks to "extend the limited capacity of their machines (netbooks)" was somewhere along the lines of "wait wat?" I could easily put a 500 GB HD in my netbook, and my primary laptop has two 500 GB 7200 RPM HDs in a RAID 1 in it. Why the hell would I need a 1000 dollar USB stick?
Why not just get a cheap external HD? Western Digital makes some great ones.
Wow, did this stir up some memories about my Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast days.
The attitude of the CoH community sounds a lot like the Saberists from JK2. They had all these 'rules' for dueling online and would clog up the deathmatch servers, vote kicking anyone that didn't play their way. Rather than actually play the game, they'd just chit chat in the corner and have duels between the players. Never mind the fact that in deathmatch mode there was a duel key that prevented the agreeing duelists from being harmed by outside forces, the Saberists preferred to just completely overtake servers and ruin game after game with their forced upon "honor" (boy I wish I was making that up). Sure you could try and find a different server, but eventually they had run off everyone else and trying to get a real game going was nigh impossible. Anyone that just wanted to play JK2 (and JK: Academy later on) straight and have a good time was hailed as a griefer, a troll and turned into a pariah.
Is what Myers did wrong? Absolutely not, he was playing as any newcomer would. I know my immediate impression would be: "An arena where the forces of good and evil do battle in order to see who's the best? Sounds like a blast! Wait, all they do is talk to each other and have their robots fight? What the fuck?"
Groups such as the CoH arena community, and the Saberists community before them deserve to be screwed with. While community rules for fair play can indeed be an important part of a game (for instance, acknowledging a certain mechanic is broken and not using it until it's fixed just out of good sportsmanship), when they're twisted around as to essentially ruin the intent of the game, then they've gone too far.
It hardly isn't a special case. After all, a decent laptop is hardly a cheap thing to replace, I wouldn't rent it out to just anybody who'd ask. Only those few who I knew wouldn't screw it up.
Course, if someone asked me these days to borrow the Sager I have now, I'd tell them to get bent, even if it was a beautiful gal with big tits giving out blowjobs in return.
When I was an apprentice in the Merchant Marines, I was one of the few who had a laptop in my dorm packed with games and music and what not. I set up a guest account with a massively long password so that those that wanted to could play the games I had on it while I was out and about on the campus doing whatever. The catch is, is that to use it I charged by the hour and I only let certain people use it so that it didn't get fucked up. Food, soda, and cigarettes were all accepted currency on top of straight cash. I had no issues saying no, and if I was busy saving the day in whatever game I was playing at the time, then too fucking bad. I don't care if you want on, it's my rig.
Start charging for access to use your laptop and don't be afraid to say no. I'm guessing most of those students aren't the smartest people in the world and you don't want one of those airheads busting your laptop after all so be judicious in who you'll let buy time. Remember, the customer is always wrong.
Is chicken a la king still the best of the MRE bunch? It's been a long while since I've had a MRE (I'm a military brat).
Anyhooo, I have no doubt that you guys could easily sleep damn near anywhere, after all you guys are Marines. It still is important to get the non-military people thinking about the more 'human' aspects of the logistics behind stationing a squad or two of Marines on board a civvy ship. Conex boxes on a cargo container ship while secured well, have been known to get accidently 'float tested' so there's the safety aspect there (not to mention the 'oh shit' moment of realizing all your gear is now being inspected by the local marine life). On an oil tanker, you guys would have to find somewhere below the main deck to camp out on (not to mention the potential hazard of shooting guns on the main deck where not even smoking is allowed), so on and so forth.
People tend to forget about all the ancillary stuff when discussing things like this.
Uh, where are they going to sleep? In a conex box? Just because the ship is big, doesn't mean that it has tons of room for people to sleep. 8-14 soldiers per squad is a lot of extra personnel on a ship. That's 8-14 more beds required, enough food for them, etc. Your average crew size for a ship tops out around 25 people for a merchant vessel and there's only enough living room on a ship like that for the crew and a couple extra people.
There is a bluetooth hack to use the Wiimote on the PC. http://wiihacks.blogspot.com/2006/12/howto-use-wii-mote-in-windows-as-your.html
So if there is a working emulator, I'm sure with some trickery and stubborness you could get a wii on the pc.
I'm kinda interested as to how well a FPS would control like this. It'd be awful handy since I travel a lot and space can be a premium making mice kind of a hassle at times. Also, if I can get it working as a mouse, then I may be able to further trick it into working as an on the go flight sim control, which would be all sorts of win.
Filesharing in general isn't going to 'promote' indy bands, it's just a way to get your music out there. You're still responsible for your own marketing and trying to lay the blame on pirates for people having not heard about you is just faulty logic. Get your album out there, get friends to help you seed it, toss an article about yourself on Wikipedia and try to get it linked to the general genre articles. Be sure to put your stuff on Youtube and tag the shit out of it. There's a lot more you can do on the internet to get yourself recognized, but you've got to work for it. Just because you formed a band doesn't mean people will magically show up at your concerts and buy/download your stuff. You can be the best performer ever, but if the only people who have ever heard of you are your dog and grandmother, then that's your own fault.
As far as the top100 lists are concerned, you have to remember that most pirates are tourists. They hop on briefly to download the latest hit album that 'omg their BFF like totally recommends.' So trying to use TPB's top100 list as a metric for success is just going to lead to total disappointment.
Some indy bands have jumped the filesharing wagon and are seeding their own music out there. Battlelore immediately springs to mind as someone who's doing it, and doing it successfully. They give you the entire album and put into a couple of the tracks a "you're listening to Battlelore's new album *insertnamehere*" message. You get to demo the entire album, they get free marketing, extra sales and fans, and everyone goes home happy.
(sidenote: Do check out Battlelore, they're all sorts of win)
The tourists however are an incredibly mixed bag of people. I'd imagine that most of them are the sort who really only download one thing, once in a while but still buy a good deal of media. However, due to the way the industry loves to spin the whole thing, obviously every 'pirate' is a lost customer rather than just someone getting a really fancy demo.
I'm kinda waiting for Demigod sales reports post Stardock fixing up their servers and the game going live nationally before I decree that yes, 95% of pirates are dicks.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just coming in to ask that exact question. Damn you Slashdotters for being so on the ball. It's absolutely mind boggling that the lawmakers don't see that as a potentially huge loophole in their attempts to keep propping up a dead business model.
When an act of terrorism causes instantaneous policy changes, then the terrorism worked and only serves to encourage others. The US government needs to stop being such a bunch of idiotic lolcows.
Since when do you need a supporting argument to back up that Americans are generally pretty braindead? Hell, just watch our nightly news and that's all the support you need. Most yanks live in a little bubble of society enforced self-delusion. That doesn't need an essay because that's just common knowledge.
I do have to admit I lol'd at excessive cursing. I haven't said a single thing that's "cursing." Sounds more like you're just a self-important twit who just happened to get some mod points for the month.
Lol, why the heck was I modded down troll? It's almost kind of ironic.
'Self & group deprecation won't win you friends across the pond.'
Whoever said I wanted to be friends with you? I live on a small island in Alaska for a reason.
I'm sure my opening line may have made some yanks butthurt, but that doesn't keep it from being any less true, not to mention that the rest of my post was completely on topic.
Americans are a bunch of knee jerky reactionists that really are about as dense as a brick of lead, and that's coming from an American. So this story really isn't that surprising. Especially with how absolutely obsessive these stupid kids are with having tons of 'friends' on facebook. They'll add anyone they know just to feel like they aren't social pariahs. Why would you have your teachers on Facebook? They don't need to know a god damned thing about your personal life. It's hardly the first time we've heard of some dumbass with people added to their facebook that really shouldn't be there (like their boss).
Retards and technology, always a bad mix.
Yeah, basically. I use Windows only because I'm a gamer, not because I'm a Windows fanboy. If I could do serious gaming on Linux, I'd go with that, but that's not happening anytime soon. However, I will take every opportunity I can get to trashtalk Macs. God damned Fisher-Price my first computers.
Who cares about sales though? What are we, volunteer marketing and PR guys for Sony and Nintendo? Should we really be giving that much of a shit about who sells more?
If you're really going to use sales as a way to debate the merits and quality of a system, then by that logic the PC gaming market is truly a barren wasteland of absolute fail considering how consoles obliterate it.
Except some of us really do "try before we buy." My collection of purchased games is absolutely huge because I do believe in supporting the developers of good games. However, what's a guy to do when a game comes out with no demo eh? Not all of us are grubby thieves here. Arrrr.
It's pretty much the only option we've got at this point, with the obvious exception being artists that are releasing their music themselves and actually get more than 2 cents and a pat on the back per album sold.
Well said good sir. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising just recently made this exact same retarded decision and payed for it with tons of canceled preorders and crap sales. At least the torrent speed for it was really good thanks to everyone not wanting to actually pay money for a game with gutted multiplayer.
The real joke to all of this is that I never play multiplayer games on the consoles for the sole reason that the multiplayer is always, without fail, completely terrible. Now they want to bring everything I hate about consoles to the PC. It's like they actually want us to pirate their crap.
I like how you concluded your argument by suggesting that I was advocating home treatments for every disease and malady in existence and that I was arguing that doctors are a waste of time. You really are doing your damndest to troll this up aren't you? Of course, you really could just be a moron, but whatever.
The fatality rate isn't unknown, the CDC has flat out been quoted as saying that it's only slightly higher than the regular flu.
Still only registering about 1/10. Try arguing less like a right wing pundit and more like someone with some brains next time, k?
Obvious troll is obvious. The only people who should be harassing doctors with this crap are the usual flu victims, kids, old people, and unusually frail people who should be taken in anyway REGARDLESS of it being h1n1 or not. And, oh wait, what's this?
"The 22-year-old patient's immune system had been weakened by Hodgkin's disease and chemotherapy"
I'm pretty sure that counts as "unusually frail people." 1/10 try again. You may want to try reading the article you're posting as a counter-argument before hitting submit next time.
Your average healthy adult just needs some bed rest, chicken soup, and OTC drugs.
I was at PAX and caught something, dunno what it was but I get feeling kind of crummy. Did I run out to a fucking doctor to find out if I had "TEH SWINE FLUES!?!?!?" No. Why? Cause there's absolute fuck all they can do.
I got home, bought some Nyquil, Aspirin, Halls, a gallon of OJ, and have been getting tons of rest. As of right now I feel way better and just have an annoying slightly plhegmy cough.
All these swine flu stories are total crap and need to stop being sensationalized. The doctor cannot help you so don't go out there and clog up the hospital with your uncurable crap. Go home, get someone to run out and buy you a cocktail of over the counter drugs, and sleep it off.
Request Tag: Slashvertisement.
The lore to WoW could easily be made up into a fairly epic sized movie (otherwise, I'm sure they could just do an hour and a half of barrens chat acted out). However, I really don't think Sam Raimi is the best director for handling LotR sized events.
Damn, beat me to it. My first thought when I read the comment about using one of these sticks to "extend the limited capacity of their machines (netbooks)" was somewhere along the lines of "wait wat?" I could easily put a 500 GB HD in my netbook, and my primary laptop has two 500 GB 7200 RPM HDs in a RAID 1 in it. Why the hell would I need a 1000 dollar USB stick?
Why not just get a cheap external HD? Western Digital makes some great ones.
Wow, did this stir up some memories about my Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast days.
The attitude of the CoH community sounds a lot like the Saberists from JK2. They had all these 'rules' for dueling online and would clog up the deathmatch servers, vote kicking anyone that didn't play their way. Rather than actually play the game, they'd just chit chat in the corner and have duels between the players. Never mind the fact that in deathmatch mode there was a duel key that prevented the agreeing duelists from being harmed by outside forces, the Saberists preferred to just completely overtake servers and ruin game after game with their forced upon "honor" (boy I wish I was making that up). Sure you could try and find a different server, but eventually they had run off everyone else and trying to get a real game going was nigh impossible. Anyone that just wanted to play JK2 (and JK: Academy later on) straight and have a good time was hailed as a griefer, a troll and turned into a pariah.
Is what Myers did wrong? Absolutely not, he was playing as any newcomer would. I know my immediate impression would be: "An arena where the forces of good and evil do battle in order to see who's the best? Sounds like a blast! Wait, all they do is talk to each other and have their robots fight? What the fuck?"
Groups such as the CoH arena community, and the Saberists community before them deserve to be screwed with. While community rules for fair play can indeed be an important part of a game (for instance, acknowledging a certain mechanic is broken and not using it until it's fixed just out of good sportsmanship), when they're twisted around as to essentially ruin the intent of the game, then they've gone too far.
5 bucks say this vaccine causes the virus to mutate and turn into something far worse than it originally was.
It hardly isn't a special case. After all, a decent laptop is hardly a cheap thing to replace, I wouldn't rent it out to just anybody who'd ask. Only those few who I knew wouldn't screw it up.
Course, if someone asked me these days to borrow the Sager I have now, I'd tell them to get bent, even if it was a beautiful gal with big tits giving out blowjobs in return.
When I was an apprentice in the Merchant Marines, I was one of the few who had a laptop in my dorm packed with games and music and what not. I set up a guest account with a massively long password so that those that wanted to could play the games I had on it while I was out and about on the campus doing whatever. The catch is, is that to use it I charged by the hour and I only let certain people use it so that it didn't get fucked up. Food, soda, and cigarettes were all accepted currency on top of straight cash. I had no issues saying no, and if I was busy saving the day in whatever game I was playing at the time, then too fucking bad. I don't care if you want on, it's my rig.
Start charging for access to use your laptop and don't be afraid to say no. I'm guessing most of those students aren't the smartest people in the world and you don't want one of those airheads busting your laptop after all so be judicious in who you'll let buy time. Remember, the customer is always wrong.
Is chicken a la king still the best of the MRE bunch? It's been a long while since I've had a MRE (I'm a military brat).
Anyhooo, I have no doubt that you guys could easily sleep damn near anywhere, after all you guys are Marines. It still is important to get the non-military people thinking about the more 'human' aspects of the logistics behind stationing a squad or two of Marines on board a civvy ship.
Conex boxes on a cargo container ship while secured well, have been known to get accidently 'float tested' so there's the safety aspect there (not to mention the 'oh shit' moment of realizing all your gear is now being inspected by the local marine life). On an oil tanker, you guys would have to find somewhere below the main deck to camp out on (not to mention the potential hazard of shooting guns on the main deck where not even smoking is allowed), so on and so forth.
People tend to forget about all the ancillary stuff when discussing things like this.
Uh, where are they going to sleep? In a conex box?
Just because the ship is big, doesn't mean that it has tons of room for people to sleep. 8-14 soldiers per squad is a lot of extra personnel on a ship. That's 8-14 more beds required, enough food for them, etc. Your average crew size for a ship tops out around 25 people for a merchant vessel and there's only enough living room on a ship like that for the crew and a couple extra people.
There is a bluetooth hack to use the Wiimote on the PC.
http://wiihacks.blogspot.com/2006/12/howto-use-wii-mote-in-windows-as-your.html
So if there is a working emulator, I'm sure with some trickery and stubborness you could get a wii on the pc.
I'm kinda interested as to how well a FPS would control like this. It'd be awful handy since I travel a lot and space can be a premium making mice kind of a hassle at times. Also, if I can get it working as a mouse, then I may be able to further trick it into working as an on the go flight sim control, which would be all sorts of win.
Filesharing in general isn't going to 'promote' indy bands, it's just a way to get your music out there. You're still responsible for your own marketing and trying to lay the blame on pirates for people having not heard about you is just faulty logic. Get your album out there, get friends to help you seed it, toss an article about yourself on Wikipedia and try to get it linked to the general genre articles. Be sure to put your stuff on Youtube and tag the shit out of it. There's a lot more you can do on the internet to get yourself recognized, but you've got to work for it. Just because you formed a band doesn't mean people will magically show up at your concerts and buy/download your stuff. You can be the best performer ever, but if the only people who have ever heard of you are your dog and grandmother, then that's your own fault.
As far as the top100 lists are concerned, you have to remember that most pirates are tourists. They hop on briefly to download the latest hit album that 'omg their BFF like totally recommends.' So trying to use TPB's top100 list as a metric for success is just going to lead to total disappointment.
Some indy bands have jumped the filesharing wagon and are seeding their own music out there. Battlelore immediately springs to mind as someone who's doing it, and doing it successfully. They give you the entire album and put into a couple of the tracks a "you're listening to Battlelore's new album *insertnamehere*" message. You get to demo the entire album, they get free marketing, extra sales and fans, and everyone goes home happy.
(sidenote: Do check out Battlelore, they're all sorts of win)
The tourists however are an incredibly mixed bag of people. I'd imagine that most of them are the sort who really only download one thing, once in a while but still buy a good deal of media. However, due to the way the industry loves to spin the whole thing, obviously every 'pirate' is a lost customer rather than just someone getting a really fancy demo.
I'm kinda waiting for Demigod sales reports post Stardock fixing up their servers and the game going live nationally before I decree that yes, 95% of pirates are dicks.