Bring up all the documentation from foreign press showing the guy's a charlatan and a swindler. Heck, try and find a friendly, competent local journalist to take up your story. I can see it now (fair warning: former journalist, my naughts were interesting when I wasn't in the depths of suicidal depression):
FOX News Version: Islamic Leader Rips Off Scotsman MSNBC Version: Fake Muslim Leader Harasses Hard-Working Immigrant
If the journalist does it right, they can get everyone on board (offensive language ahead - complaints department will be open from 2348 to 2349 on 30 Feb 2013, please leave comments then): the surface layer ignorant Joe Schmoes who just see some towelhead trying to do some kind of wrong; people with more than five functioning brain cells will see a cult leader that's trying to smear your name, and for extra bonus points, if you're really lucky, followers of the Prophet will be pissed that someone who has the audacity to claim to be one of them (a) has their religion so wrong; (b) has done so many disgraceful, disturbing, and disgusting things in the past; and (c) is being such an asshat to someone yadda yadda yadda.
When it comes to keeping your eye out for other cultists... hell. there was that theft from the Scientology center that went unsolved all those years ago and -- ---NO CARRIER
Copyright.gov: $35 to file online. Seriously - you show up with that certificate in hand, especially in the context of potential court issues, it's worth it. Takes maybe three weeks to get the certificate if everything's done right the first time, and if not, they are willing to help you. Just filed for my group's first formal copyright docs a few weeks ago, got an email from the copyright office with a few questions, took care of the problems, received the certificate, and framed it.
And hopefully will never have to do anything else.
I'm not a lawyer, I rarely play one online anymore (stupid wikipedia destroying my client base) so this shouldn't be taken as legal advice. This is how I, a vindictive evil bastard who really would like people who do bad bad things be whacked upside the head hard, would like things to play out in an ideal world.
Let's start with venue: You're in the US, Google's in the US, US courts are probably the right place to pursue action. Doesn't matter if the other person is in another place, they played with YouTube, which, if I read my ToS correctly, says that problems eventually end up in a Palo Alto courtroom. Oh, wait, they do: Actual quote from their TOS: Section 14, General: You agree that: (i) the Service shall be deemed solely based in California; and (ii) the Service shall be deemed a passive website that does not give rise to personal jurisdiction over YouTube, either specific or general, in jurisdictions other than California.
Go in small claims first: they don't show up, you win by default, Google takes them down.
Now, since they've also made a perjury declaration, you can also then have criminal charges brought because perjury is a *crime*, punishable by fines and jail time. Part of the evidence? If they had a case to make, they'd have showed up to the civil case to defend themselves. Now, with a criminal conviction - a felony, by the way - there are a fair few countries that will extradite someone who's been convicted of such a crime... one reason being that contempt for one country's legal system kinda points to a potential for contempt for any country's legal system.
Nice little circle of life. And in the afterlife where you're partying hard (or, as the other person will describe your endless choices of debauchery and metasensory overload, "hell"), you can laugh even harder.
I know. I didn't run into any serious challenges until college. Hell, I never took notes, never did homework, never used a calculator, and still scored A-'s in all my classes, a 750 math on my SATs and a 35 math, 32 composite on my ACTs.
And I too was in the 'advanced' or 'honors' classes.. yet they still wanted me to operate by the old standard procedures.
I ran into only one professor that basically worked well with my modus operandi. Ironically for a numbers nerd, it was in a series of history classes. Prof said that our grades were based entirely on three papers to be submitted on three specific dates on three topics specified in the syllabus. Either you went to the class and took notes, and submitted papers which were related to the topic, or you didn't. He never took attendance, never made assumptions, liked when you would submit a cogent paper which disagreed with his premises, and really liked it when you did the research. As in, went to nearly a dozen libraries, searched for first degree sources, properly cited, etc.
That was a great class. And he was the first prof outside of comp sci cool with me using my laptop for notes. (And I did it with an emacs terminal.
Generally, though, without adequate access of resources by the parents (read: money or mobility), a kid's stuck in the schools local to him or her. In Illinois, my pied a terre for example, if you're in a poor district and want to send your kid to a richer district, you either have to move there or pay the equivalent tuition. (The latter option is rarely engaged.)
And if you're in that situtation, you may as well send the kid to a parochial or private school.
Personally, I would suggest a solution similar to one proposed by Dan Savage for other kids that want to opt-out of high school: get a GED, get into at the least a community college, and be done with HS if there's no option for a good high school. Hell of a lot cheaper, and yeah, it means not dealing with the wankers in high school but it also means that there's more challenge that the kid can handle. And at a younger age, when he will feel like he can hack it... Or move to another country that gives an active damn about education. Canada, let's say.
In my case, the speed is nice, but it's the specific application that defined where it went.
I have a laptop being used as a desktop replacement. In previous attempts to do so, the HD eventually overheated and burned out. Sometimes the laptop fell down, jammed the drive. (What can I say - I'm a klutz.)
I hope that the lawsuit - which, I'm pretty sure, will move forward against him, as he is suing under no law that, well, EXISTS - make Jack as fiscally bankrupt as he is morally.
1. Canada. Already have a citizenship there, enjoy the smoke-easies, sane media, friendly culture, and much less likely to get whacked. 2. A major city in Western Europe. Already have a citizenship there (well, in an EU country, anyways), understand enough of most of the languages to get into a barfight (though, of course, the true test of fluency is getting *out* of one), (usually) good food, very urban (sorry- couldn't get used to being on a farm), no need for a car, less chance of natural disaster, tons of football on TV. 3. Australia or New Zealand. English speakers, Christmas barbeques, New Year's in shorts and bikinis, close enough to HK to get new Jackie Chan films quickly (on a weekend trip up there). 4. Shanghai. Cheap living (in US dollars by western standards), tons of expats, chance to learn Shanghainese if I have the lack of life I do here (the only "dialect" of Chinese that is the least tonal (like most languages, it's bitonal).
Why don't I leave?
Mainly, the reason's fiscal. I'm up to my ears in debt, which I am slowly but surely working off. It takes money or a set job to pick up and move halfway around the world. American dollars don't stretch as far as they used to, either. For example, at the Sydney Olympics, USD 1 was roughly AUD 2. Now, it takes USD 0.75 to buy an Aussie dollar. When the Euro was finally unveiled, I went to my bank and bought EUR 35 of uncirculated banknotes for under $32; I wish I had bought more, since the current exchange rate is roughly USD 1.25 to EUR 1 (as opposed to the USD 0.85 to EUR 1 of four years ago).
Next, I haven't given up on America. Granted, the past six years have been marked by a rubberstamp Congress and a Supreme Court which is unstable in its decisions, but assuming the people who voted the wrong way (as in "against their own best interests") wake the f*** up and punch a different number on the ballot, we stand a chance of fixing some of the more egregious problems.
I'm lucky in that I have at least the theoretical escape hatches my foreign citizenships give me, but unless this country gets really bad, I'm not going to give up.
Until the draft starts up and they ban the HOPE conferences, in which case me and my Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, green-tea-drinking, Wal-Mart-hating, organic-eating, hemp-wearing, homebrewing, long-haired, antifundamentalist liberal ass shifts into fifth and hightails it outta here.
Re civil liberties... Sh!t.... they can still refuse entry into the US for persons who support anarchism!
Re game Sh!t.... they should still be playing Nuclear War! Fun game, and quite often everyone loses!
In fact, I view this game as similar to NucWar; the former was released in 1964. Just after the Cuban Missle Crisis.
Hopefully, this game will get respect similar to NucWar. NucWar has been played in nuclear subs, missle silos and "places that don't officially exist".. maybe this game will get the same respect.
Trouble is, last Saturday I was on the ass-end of this exact situation.
I was shooting photos of various houses, and long story short, police come out an do everything but arrest me, as I was doing nothing illegal.
I'm not going to say where, since I'm considering legal action against the other side, but people are f***ing stupid in this country when it comes to security.
"We must get National Security Money to protect our town's Giant Wax Donut from a terrorist attack!!"
Look lady, no one give's a burning rat turd about your pathetic one-horse town's insignificant monument to kickbacks, ok? Hell, news about it is only now reaching Cleveland, and you've had it there for twenty-five years!
This is an old story.. I believe I heard it on NPR more than half a year ago.
There are certain upsides for the patients. Yes, they're risking their lives for the chance at health, but in return they are at least getting some medical care. If they're lucky some previously unknown ailment will disqualify them from the study, and get them into one which is more appropriate.
As a lab rat without health insurance, most of my medical care has been through such studies. I get the meds I need to keep on breathing, as well as a shot at something which may make my life more bearable.
They are - and have been - and probably will be - a political and religious powderkeg.
Greeks in particular have a few things to be pissed about. The religious leader of their faith is in a different country because of how the lines were redrawn post-WWI. Hundreds of thousands were massacred in Asia Minor during the '20s by the Turks, but no one there will admit to it. (And yes, I know, they didn't get the worst of it. It was still brutal.)
In 1452, they (and the rest of the Orthodox world) lost their highest cathedral to the Ottomans, who desecrated parts of Hagia Sophia and turned it into a mosque. (Think of it as though St Peter's were conquered by Iran.) Now it's used solely as a tourist site.
The name of Macedonia was assigned to the former southern province of communist Yugoslavia in 1952 by Tito.
There's no historic basis for the name; the region of Macedonia whence Philip and Alexander came from was much further south.
Yes, at the time, there was no concept of Hellenic unity; that developed mainly after the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, which put the final nail in the coffin of unity between Rome and Constantinople. However, there was this understanding that they spoke the same tongue, they learned the same thought (pop quiz: who taught Alexander?), they spread the same ideas and believed in the same faith as everyone else on the peninsula now known as Greece.
The Balkans as a whole are rife with religious and ethnic hates going back centuries. The Catholics hate the Orthodox, and both hate the Muslims. The Croatians and Albanians and Serbians are at each others' throats, the Greeks hate the Albanians for taking part of their country, the Turks for the same reason as well as the historical stuff, and everybody hate the Roma (gypsies).
The only thing that kept a lid on Yugoslavia's ethnic groups, well, was the iron fist of Tito.
Female geeks are one thing. Being both female and a geek are not bad things. Geekgrrls, in my limited observation, and non-geek women are indistinguishable at a glance (barring the obvious like hosting a BOF session or Local LUG meeting). In terms of social graces, both in behavior and appearance, you just don't know.
Faking it as a guy is another.
As a real male geek, generally speaking, there is the stereotype of social maladroitness and unkempt appearance. (Not that that's a hard-and-fast rule; you can find male geeks wearing fashionable clothes and three-piece suits, and you can find male geeks who are the life of the party and/or (usually and) have an attractive date. But the stereotype exists for a reason.)
I mean, what the hell are real male geeks good for other than setting up networks, getting you online, removing spyware, deleting viruses, upgrading software, programming the VCR.....
I went to GC:SC last year as a Magic judge, and since I was the night shift guy, all I had to do was....
umm..
stay awake.
I chose to not sleep at GC, and did so almost successfully (I sacked in a couple hours early Sunday.)
Problem I can see at GCSC this year is that the timing is off.
-> WotC's MtG Worlds are the same weekend, in Japan. -> Pinball Expo is the same weekend, in Chicago. (In case you didn't know or care, only one company still produces pinball, and that's a Chicago company. Also, this month's LJ has an article about RTLinux replacing a destroyed pinball motherboard. )
Beyond that, I'm also going to WolfCon on Black Friday. Much better waste of time than thronging shops.. ok, I'll admit it, I'll do a 6am run on the shops before heading to the con;)
Re:D&D: No sign of dying. (Paranoia fiends uni
on
Dungeons and Shadows
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
-->Stand by for SHAMELESS SEGMENT OF DOOM.
I'm sorry, citizen, but knowledge of diplomacy, parties, or level are above your security clearance.
Perhaps you are referring to NASTY EVIL COMMIE MUTANT TRAITOROUS SCUM?
This infraction has been noted on your permanent record.
Please stand by for IntSec pickup for re-education and termination.
Have a nice day.
PARANOIA is fun because The Computer says it's fun. Stop playing non-fun RPGs! Play PARANOIA!
-->SHAMELESS SEGMENT CONCLUDED. THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND.
If you have a chance to crack the core rulebook for PARANOIA, seriously, do so. There's the End Citizen License Agreement (7. TERMINATION. You may be terminated.) and a great segment called, "If Popular Fantasy RPG worked like PARANOIA ("Wait! Did you almost call us 'Comrades'? That's a Commie word!")
And it's a blast getting players to stab each other's backs so many times they just gush.. blood....
I hope you enjoyed that $300 check the feds sent a few years ago...
This is the end effect.
Taxes that the fed collected went, in part, to states.
Now, states are in fiscal hell, and are searching desperately for new revenue streams. If they can figure out a simple way to tax online, then dammit they will because they need the money.
(And until someone with a pair goes into politics and cuts out the pork, well, they'll still need more money.)
Slashdot Mirror
..now I'll have to worry about viruses? And popups? And even more poorly written software?
There is a lot in the model that isn't fully accounted for. But they're getting better.
Still, shoot me for at least acknowledging the anthropic principle.
Bring up all the documentation from foreign press showing the guy's a charlatan and a swindler. Heck, try and find a friendly, competent local journalist to take up your story. I can see it now (fair warning: former journalist, my naughts were interesting when I wasn't in the depths of suicidal depression):
FOX News Version: Islamic Leader Rips Off Scotsman
MSNBC Version: Fake Muslim Leader Harasses Hard-Working Immigrant
If the journalist does it right, they can get everyone on board (offensive language ahead - complaints department will be open from 2348 to 2349 on 30 Feb 2013, please leave comments then): the surface layer ignorant Joe Schmoes who just see some towelhead trying to do some kind of wrong; people with more than five functioning brain cells will see a cult leader that's trying to smear your name, and for extra bonus points, if you're really lucky, followers of the Prophet will be pissed that someone who has the audacity to claim to be one of them (a) has their religion so wrong; (b) has done so many disgraceful, disturbing, and disgusting things in the past; and (c) is being such an asshat to someone yadda yadda yadda.
When it comes to keeping your eye out for other cultists... hell. there was that theft from the Scientology center that went unsolved all those years ago and --
---NO CARRIER
Copyright.gov: $35 to file online. Seriously - you show up with that certificate in hand, especially in the context of potential court issues, it's worth it. Takes maybe three weeks to get the certificate if everything's done right the first time, and if not, they are willing to help you. Just filed for my group's first formal copyright docs a few weeks ago, got an email from the copyright office with a few questions, took care of the problems, received the certificate, and framed it.
And hopefully will never have to do anything else.
Worth. Every. Penny.
For what it's worth.. I say fight on.
I'm not a lawyer, I rarely play one online anymore (stupid wikipedia destroying my client base) so this shouldn't be taken as legal advice. This is how I, a vindictive evil bastard who really would like people who do bad bad things be whacked upside the head hard, would like things to play out in an ideal world.
Let's start with venue: You're in the US, Google's in the US, US courts are probably the right place to pursue action. Doesn't matter if the other person is in another place, they played with YouTube, which, if I read my ToS correctly, says that problems eventually end up in a Palo Alto courtroom. Oh, wait, they do: Actual quote from their TOS: Section 14, General: You agree that: (i) the Service shall be deemed solely based in California; and (ii) the Service shall be deemed a passive website that does not give rise to personal jurisdiction over YouTube, either specific or general, in jurisdictions other than California.
Go in small claims first: they don't show up, you win by default, Google takes them down.
Now, since they've also made a perjury declaration, you can also then have criminal charges brought because perjury is a *crime*, punishable by fines and jail time. Part of the evidence? If they had a case to make, they'd have showed up to the civil case to defend themselves. Now, with a criminal conviction - a felony, by the way - there are a fair few countries that will extradite someone who's been convicted of such a crime... one reason being that contempt for one country's legal system kinda points to a potential for contempt for any country's legal system.
Nice little circle of life. And in the afterlife where you're partying hard (or, as the other person will describe your endless choices of debauchery and metasensory overload, "hell"), you can laugh even harder.
I know. I didn't run into any serious challenges until college. Hell, I never took notes, never did homework, never used a calculator, and still scored A-'s in all my classes, a 750 math on my SATs and a 35 math, 32 composite on my ACTs.
And I too was in the 'advanced' or 'honors' classes.. yet they still wanted me to operate by the old standard procedures.
I ran into only one professor that basically worked well with my modus operandi. Ironically for a numbers nerd, it was in a series of history classes. Prof said that our grades were based entirely on three papers to be submitted on three specific dates on three topics specified in the syllabus. Either you went to the class and took notes, and submitted papers which were related to the topic, or you didn't. He never took attendance, never made assumptions, liked when you would submit a cogent paper which disagreed with his premises, and really liked it when you did the research. As in, went to nearly a dozen libraries, searched for first degree sources, properly cited, etc.
That was a great class. And he was the first prof outside of comp sci cool with me using my laptop for notes. (And I did it with an emacs terminal.
Generally, though, without adequate access of resources by the parents (read: money or mobility), a kid's stuck in the schools local to him or her. In Illinois, my pied a terre for example, if you're in a poor district and want to send your kid to a richer district, you either have to move there or pay the equivalent tuition. (The latter option is rarely engaged.)
And if you're in that situtation, you may as well send the kid to a parochial or private school.
Personally, I would suggest a solution similar to one proposed by Dan Savage for other kids that want to opt-out of high school: get a GED, get into at the least a community college, and be done with HS if there's no option for a good high school. Hell of a lot cheaper, and yeah, it means not dealing with the wankers in high school but it also means that there's more challenge that the kid can handle. And at a younger age, when he will feel like he can hack it. .. Or move to another country that gives an active damn about education. Canada, let's say.
Now, if it had a couple thousand more pounds, we'd have a bona fide 16 ton weight.
Too bad he Pythons never thought of it exploding, though...
In my case, the speed is nice, but it's the specific application that defined where it went.
I have a laptop being used as a desktop replacement. In previous attempts to do so, the HD eventually overheated and burned out. Sometimes the laptop fell down, jammed the drive. (What can I say - I'm a klutz.)
Not going to happen with an SSD.
Well, what can I say.
I hope that the lawsuit - which, I'm pretty sure, will move forward against him, as he is suing under no law that, well, EXISTS - make Jack as fiscally bankrupt as he is morally.
My choices on where to go would be:
1. Canada. Already have a citizenship there, enjoy the smoke-easies, sane media, friendly culture, and much less likely to get whacked.
2. A major city in Western Europe. Already have a citizenship there (well, in an EU country, anyways), understand enough of most of the languages to get into a barfight (though, of course, the true test of fluency is getting *out* of one), (usually) good food, very urban (sorry- couldn't get used to being on a farm), no need for a car, less chance of natural disaster, tons of football on TV.
3. Australia or New Zealand. English speakers, Christmas barbeques, New Year's in shorts and bikinis, close enough to HK to get new Jackie Chan films quickly (on a weekend trip up there).
4. Shanghai. Cheap living (in US dollars by western standards), tons of expats, chance to learn Shanghainese if I have the lack of life I do here (the only "dialect" of Chinese that is the least tonal (like most languages, it's bitonal).
Why don't I leave?
Mainly, the reason's fiscal. I'm up to my ears in debt, which I am slowly but surely working off. It takes money or a set job to pick up and move halfway around the world. American dollars don't stretch as far as they used to, either. For example, at the Sydney Olympics, USD 1 was roughly AUD 2. Now, it takes USD 0.75 to buy an Aussie dollar. When the Euro was finally unveiled, I went to my bank and bought EUR 35 of uncirculated banknotes for under $32; I wish I had bought more, since the current exchange rate is roughly USD 1.25 to EUR 1 (as opposed to the USD 0.85 to EUR 1 of four years ago).
Next, I haven't given up on America. Granted, the past six years have been marked by a rubberstamp Congress and a Supreme Court which is unstable in its decisions, but assuming the people who voted the wrong way (as in "against their own best interests") wake the f*** up and punch a different number on the ballot, we stand a chance of fixing some of the more egregious problems.
I'm lucky in that I have at least the theoretical escape hatches my foreign citizenships give me, but unless this country gets really bad, I'm not going to give up.
Until the draft starts up and they ban the HOPE conferences, in which case me and my Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, green-tea-drinking, Wal-Mart-hating, organic-eating, hemp-wearing, homebrewing, long-haired, antifundamentalist liberal ass shifts into fifth and hightails it outta here.
Exactly.
Of course, smaller capacity is directly because the battery itself is 2/3 the size of a normal AA to accomodate the USB charger.
Then again, getting regular NiMH AA's and rigging up your own small USB based trickle charger isn't that hard...
Re civil liberties...
Sh!t.... they can still refuse entry into the US for persons who support anarchism!
Re game
Sh!t.... they should still be playing Nuclear War! Fun game, and quite often everyone loses!
In fact, I view this game as similar to NucWar; the former was released in 1964. Just after the Cuban Missle Crisis.
Hopefully, this game will get respect similar to NucWar. NucWar has been played in nuclear subs, missle silos and "places that don't officially exist".. maybe this game will get the same respect.
If this were last Friday, I'd laugh at that.
Trouble is, last Saturday I was on the ass-end of this exact situation.
I was shooting photos of various houses, and long story short, police come out an do everything but arrest me, as I was doing nothing illegal.
I'm not going to say where, since I'm considering legal action against the other side, but people are f***ing stupid in this country when it comes to security.
"We must get National Security Money to protect our town's Giant Wax Donut from a terrorist attack!!"
Look lady, no one give's a burning rat turd about your pathetic one-horse town's insignificant monument to kickbacks, ok? Hell, news about it is only now reaching Cleveland, and you've had it there for twenty-five years!
Solitaire-uh.. is the devil!
Solitaire is the plan-uh of the unholy one-uh to steal the souls-uh of innocent people-uh!
DO you know where your Solitaire time goes? It goes to-uh Satan himself-uh!
DO you care-uh about your loved ones-uh?
DO you want-uh to save-uh them from the fires of eternal damnation-uh?
Delete the infernal Solitaire, and tell them to stop playing with themselves!
Delete the infernal Solitaire, and tell them to spend time with to go outside-uh!
Delete the infernal Solitaire, and they will thank you.
And I thought stat-inflation was bad before...
"Loknar, roll ten to the eighteenth D4s. And this time, try to keep them all on the table."
This is an old story.. I believe I heard it on NPR more than half a year ago.
There are certain upsides for the patients. Yes, they're risking their lives for the chance at health, but in return they are at least getting some medical care. If they're lucky some previously unknown ailment will disqualify them from the study, and get them into one which is more appropriate.
As a lab rat without health insurance, most of my medical care has been through such studies. I get the meds I need to keep on breathing, as well as a shot at something which may make my life more bearable.
Something to keep in mind about the Balkans:
They are - and have been - and probably will be - a political and religious powderkeg.
Greeks in particular have a few things to be pissed about. The religious leader of their faith is in a different country because of how the lines were redrawn post-WWI. Hundreds of thousands were massacred in Asia Minor during the '20s by the Turks, but no one there will admit to it. (And yes, I know, they didn't get the worst of it. It was still brutal.)
In 1452, they (and the rest of the Orthodox world) lost their highest cathedral to the Ottomans, who desecrated parts of Hagia Sophia and turned it into a mosque. (Think of it as though St Peter's were conquered by Iran.) Now it's used solely as a tourist site.
The name of Macedonia was assigned to the former southern province of communist Yugoslavia in 1952 by Tito.
There's no historic basis for the name; the region of Macedonia whence Philip and Alexander came from was much further south.
Yes, at the time, there was no concept of Hellenic unity; that developed mainly after the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, which put the final nail in the coffin of unity between Rome and Constantinople. However, there was this understanding that they spoke the same tongue, they learned the same thought (pop quiz: who taught Alexander?), they spread the same ideas and believed in the same faith as everyone else on the peninsula now known as Greece.
The Balkans as a whole are rife with religious and ethnic hates going back centuries. The Catholics hate the Orthodox, and both hate the Muslims. The Croatians and Albanians and Serbians are at each others' throats, the Greeks hate the Albanians for taking part of their country, the Turks for the same reason as well as the historical stuff, and everybody hate the Roma (gypsies).
The only thing that kept a lid on Yugoslavia's ethnic groups, well, was the iron fist of Tito.
Are you kidding?
On any kind of broadband, this should run to your system super-fast. There are hundreds of seeders for this thing!
Even a 56k modem should get this chunked through within a day.
PlentyOfFish.com Brought Down By Massive Slashdotting
Female geeks are one thing. Being both female and a geek are not bad things. Geekgrrls, in my limited observation, and non-geek women are indistinguishable at a glance (barring the obvious like hosting a BOF session or Local LUG meeting). In terms of social graces, both in behavior and appearance, you just don't know.
Faking it as a guy is another.
As a real male geek, generally speaking, there is the stereotype of social maladroitness and unkempt appearance. (Not that that's a hard-and-fast rule; you can find male geeks wearing fashionable clothes and three-piece suits, and you can find male geeks who are the life of the party and/or (usually and) have an attractive date. But the stereotype exists for a reason.)
I mean, what the hell are real male geeks good for other than setting up networks, getting you online, removing spyware, deleting viruses, upgrading software, programming the VCR.....
Excuse me for a moment.
;)
I would like to yell obscenities at people who are addicted to video games.
If you're on a Wintel box, easiest first step to take is UNINSTALL SOLITAIRE.
Best step to take is to go Linux, since the Mondo Big Games are not as available. (Besides, GNU Chess is better for you
Hell, I used to be a hardcore Civ addict, up until 2am trying to get my people to not die.
And I used to be a real net addict, up all hours with a 14.4 modem.
People can just get over the addictive junk and get back to stuff that's marginally productive.
(Now, if only I can get some f***ing credit for the bandcasting idea...)
I went to GC:SC last year as a Magic judge, and since I was the night shift guy, all I had to do was....
;)
umm..
stay awake.
I chose to not sleep at GC, and did so almost successfully (I sacked in a couple hours early Sunday.)
Problem I can see at GCSC this year is that the timing is off.
-> WotC's MtG Worlds are the same weekend, in Japan.
-> Pinball Expo is the same weekend, in Chicago. (In case you didn't know or care, only one company still produces pinball, and that's a Chicago company. Also, this month's LJ has an article about RTLinux replacing a destroyed pinball motherboard. )
Beyond that, I'm also going to WolfCon on Black Friday. Much better waste of time than thronging shops.. ok, I'll admit it, I'll do a 6am run on the shops before heading to the con
-->Stand by for SHAMELESS SEGMENT OF DOOM.
I'm sorry, citizen, but knowledge of diplomacy, parties, or level are above your security clearance.
Perhaps you are referring to NASTY EVIL COMMIE MUTANT TRAITOROUS SCUM?
This infraction has been noted on your permanent record.
Please stand by for IntSec pickup for re-education and termination.
Have a nice day.
PARANOIA is fun because The Computer says it's fun. Stop playing non-fun RPGs! Play PARANOIA!
-->SHAMELESS SEGMENT CONCLUDED. THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND.
If you have a chance to crack the core rulebook for PARANOIA, seriously, do so. There's the End Citizen License Agreement (7. TERMINATION. You may be terminated.) and a great segment called, "If Popular Fantasy RPG worked like PARANOIA ("Wait! Did you almost call us 'Comrades'? That's a Commie word!")
And it's a blast getting players to stab each other's backs so many times they just gush.. blood....
If you don't believe me.. visit this site: http://www.poet.caligrean.com/ and see the Bush team playing it!
I hope you enjoyed that $300 check the feds sent a few years ago...
This is the end effect.
Taxes that the fed collected went, in part, to states.
Now, states are in fiscal hell, and are searching desperately for new revenue streams. If they can figure out a simple way to tax online, then dammit they will because they need the money.
(And until someone with a pair goes into politics and cuts out the pork, well, they'll still need more money.)