I know I'm supposed to be lighting my torch and grabbing my pitchfork over the curtailing of basic freedoms. But honestly, while it certainly doesn't make me happy, my outrage is tempered by the fact that they're cracking down on annoying bullshit, and assholes who are probably spamming.
I mean, it's not good that these sites are getting shut down the way they're getting shut down, but they won't be missed.
Even if I could read chinese (well, enough to be able to rightfully claim I can), they wouldn't be missed.
Sampling voice clips from the original film and employing cutting edge vector graphics, the game broke boundaries and raised the bar for licensed video games.
It raised the bar for licensed video games...to the place where it remains today. Jeezus fucking christ.
And tried it, and tried it. Everyone and their cousin set up some "adult verification" affiliate network, to the point where there's so damned many of them, with such scant content you may as well not have any consolidation of logins.
How is this any different? Why can any of these parties succeed where pornographers have failed? IS MICROSOFT BETTER THAN SMUT PEDDLERS?
This adds to the suckitude of Korea's Communication Law as it pertains to US Military stationed in Korea.
As part of this law, many activities (including getting a cell phone contract, or using just about any ecommerce site) require the use of a resident registration number. This is something akin to a social security number in the US, except that non-citizens can get one legitimately when they register as a legal resident. I cannot, however, as US Military in korea cannot register.
So I'm stuck using a damned prepaid phone, with almost no services available except voice. There's internet access, but at least according to the cell phone salespeople I spoke to, most SMS services can't receive from or send to regular email accounts (so much for Korea's vaunted technological lead on the US cell phone market!)
So basically, this is just one more thing helping to prevent US military in korea from ever seeing koreans as anything but a bunch of back-stabbing scam artists who want nothing but to separate them from their money (no shortage of those right outside the gate...not that they're all bad, of course, but that's how a lot of americans see them) and koreans from seeing US military members as a bunch of drunken assholes, or drunken rubes. How many straws can this camel hold?
I was shopping for computer crap with a friend of mine in Japan, where they've got lots and lots of Transmeta based subnotebooks. So I started comparing. The Pentium Ms were okay. They ran pretty cool, but you could still feel the heat. The Transmeta machines, if you turned off the monitor, you probably wouldn't even know they were on.
The problem is that if a voting machine is programmed to cheat, it is easy enough to fake a paper receipt. I could cast a vote for A, have the screen verify that I am voting for A, receive a printed receipt that tells me I voted for A, and STILL have that vote count for B within the black box.
The paper trail is a red herring, if you ask me. What is really needed is publicly-available source code that anyone can view.
Open source woudn't be a bad idea.
But you totally misunderstand the idea of a paper trail. It's NOT the receipt that you get printed. It's like the printed record of a cash register. If THAT were visible to the voter as it was printed, and then stored securely, you would have a record that you could review if there were questions later on. Just like store managers do every day.
If you want it to be machine readable, you could have it print a bar code for each voting option chosen. For ease of readability in recounts, selected candidates could be in big bold print. It would help those with bad vision, too.
AND the voter could have a little printed receipt to take home, if they want. (Hey, you could even choose not to have one, just like an ATM. But gee, companies like Diebold don't have any expertise in THAT area, do they?)
It's not the monumental technological hurdle that the assholes who sell these machines claim. ATMs and cash registers have done it for ages. The only hurdle is one imposed by not designing such provisions in from the start, whether for cost-cutting reasons (or sales-inflating reasons, if you can sell upgrade kits later on), or out of right-wing conspiracy reasons.
Fucking....assholes. FUCK-ING-ASS-HOLES. Pretty soon the only way your vote will ever count is if you vote with bullets.
It's not no one's fault, you know. You chose to live in a place built around cars, probably with little accomodation made for anything else. So did a lot of other people. The more people who do that the less options there are. Public transportation won't be improved because everyone has to have a car, so even when they don't need to use the car, they're more likely to do so anyway...the public transit won't be used enough to be good (a bus every hour and a half doesn't even count as having a system IMO...I lived somewhere like that). Not that there would be money to pay for it, with it all going to pay for the upkeep of roads.
Why should you, and all the other people who helped make the bed you all now have to sleep in have to pay for it? Because someone has to, or your whole system, which you are dependent upon, will collapse, or at least degrade.
On the plus side, the more of you who get frustrated with having to pay for your unhealthy, inefficient lifestyle, the more people will be clamoring for alternatives, and maybe suburbia will get some of it's problems fixed.
Me, if I can't find a job in one of the handful of US cities which ISN'T a fucking wreck when it comes to it's infrastructure choices, I'm staying overseas.
It gives a lone coder the ability to participate in larger projects if they want to, while using the work of the larger group as a basis for filling niches.
There has got to be SOMEONE out there making a living customizing open source software for specific needs, by himself (and lets not kid ourselves here, it's almost certainly HIMself).
They're VERY important to me in a game like Grand Theft Auto. I like the exquisite detail of the stats in GTA3 and Vice City, but the wording and timing in the original GTA was beautiful. I would go around shooting pedestrians to see how high I could get my "murder one" count. (Displayed when you finally get killed)
As for the only other game I give a rat's ass about stats in: TFC...stats are nice, but the point systems used really don't differentiate or account for classes. A Soldier, Sniper or HWG, or on some maps Spy or Engineer can really rack up the kills. A pyro pretty much won't, and a medic, while actually accellerating many deaths greatly, usually doesn't get credited for their kills. Some method of accounting for assists would help those classes. Caps should be noted separately. (it would almost never help pyros or HWGs anyway, but they do bring up scores for spies, medics, and scouts)
OTOH, sometimes I wish there was no score kept when playing Dustbowl. That way people might be more inclined to work as a team instead of just going out to get as many kills as they can.
There have always been a lot of americans who never look for GOOD comparisons when someone confronts them with a problem in or with the United States. My dad never uses anything but Mexico or Canada. (Think every conservative who says something like "Socialized medicine? You mean like what they have in Canada?"...ignoring both the numerous other better examples AND the fact that they know fuck-all about how canada's health care system works)
It's easier to believe that US is the be all and end all when it comes to lifestyle ("highest standard of living"? If that means more of everything, perhaps, but is that always good?), if you never look at any other developed country for comparison.
That said, India and China are the major sticking points on the Kyoto Protocol, for the US, because they are now and will be in the future our major competitors. It would be foolish for the united states to agree to strict limitations on CO2 emissions when China and India don't have any. Even if they just put a cap on growth, that would go a long way to winning the US over. (Correct me if I'm wrong, of course, I haven't updated myself on this in a while)
I just hope that these discs are marked. I'd consider them for short-term (less than a few months) backups, but not for something where I might want to hold onto it indefinitely. Of course, it's hard enough to find CDRs which can be trusted with important data for longer than a few months NOW.
"Permanent Death: Yes, a lot of game designers love this one. However, go make a list of the successful games with this 'feature'. It's short because people don't enjoy losing their investments. Permanent Death closes exactly one door. It does not open any that aren't already typically available to the players who want them."
RTFA-Again
He makes this point, that it doesn't happen because people wouldn't like it.
Except it WOULD open doors. It would open doors to anyone who gets their ass kicked relentlessly not because they suck, but because there are people who already have their characters built up who are waiting to kick their asses.
The only advantage early adoption would present is knowledge of the game. It would not GUARANTEE a super-powerful godlike character who can stomp all comers.
"Instanceing: This is an adequate solution to the crowding problem. A better one is to provide sufficiently breadth not to need instanceing. Build a game without need for instanceing and you'll have a hit, guaranteed."
People might still want it, though.
Also, you'd need to have a world which scales to the number of players, or which has areas which attract players who don't want that privacy, without depriving them of anything else. You couldn't just make a HUGE fricking world. Otherwise, you'd have it too full (like you're talking about) or too empty, either when the game starts or during off-peak hours. No one wants to play an unpopulated online game. Well, not usually.
I'd have to agree with you on the teleportation part, though. There are other solutions to that problem if you just find teleportation aesthetically displeasing though.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'm supposed to be lighting my torch and grabbing my pitchfork over the curtailing of basic freedoms. But honestly, while it certainly doesn't make me happy, my outrage is tempered by the fact that they're cracking down on annoying bullshit, and assholes who are probably spamming.
I mean, it's not good that these sites are getting shut down the way they're getting shut down, but they won't be missed.
Even if I could read chinese (well, enough to be able to rightfully claim I can), they wouldn't be missed.
What other than software can be both copyrighted and patented?
What the fuck have we been paying that universal service fee for?
Sampling voice clips from the original film and employing cutting edge vector graphics, the game broke boundaries and raised the bar for licensed video games.
It raised the bar for licensed video games...to the place where it remains today. Jeezus fucking christ.
I could give you a link in google or yahoo that would do the same thing. Is Yahoo a pornographer?
:P
Yes, but not as good a pornographer as Bomis.
Make your next notebook a Centrino, or better yet a Crusoe. Not much heat from either (barely detectable from the latter)
Prepaid phones. Not plans.
And I'm just repeating what the people at two different shops told me, re emailsms.
Clearly I have been unable to test it myself. Fuck.
'Nuff said.
Or did I. WTF is Centrino, anyway?
Whatever, if you want a cool, quiet PC, Transmeta is IT.
And tried it, and tried it. Everyone and their cousin set up some "adult verification" affiliate network, to the point where there's so damned many of them, with such scant content you may as well not have any consolidation of logins.
How is this any different? Why can any of these parties succeed where pornographers have failed? IS MICROSOFT BETTER THAN SMUT PEDDLERS?
This adds to the suckitude of Korea's Communication Law as it pertains to US Military stationed in Korea.
As part of this law, many activities (including getting a cell phone contract, or using just about any ecommerce site) require the use of a resident registration number. This is something akin to a social security number in the US, except that non-citizens can get one legitimately when they register as a legal resident. I cannot, however, as US Military in korea cannot register.
So I'm stuck using a damned prepaid phone, with almost no services available except voice. There's internet access, but at least according to the cell phone salespeople I spoke to, most SMS services can't receive from or send to regular email accounts (so much for Korea's vaunted technological lead on the US cell phone market!)
So basically, this is just one more thing helping to prevent US military in korea from ever seeing koreans as anything but a bunch of back-stabbing scam artists who want nothing but to separate them from their money (no shortage of those right outside the gate...not that they're all bad, of course, but that's how a lot of americans see them) and koreans from seeing US military members as a bunch of drunken assholes, or drunken rubes. How many straws can this camel hold?
Ooops, sorry, I meant to say Centrino. Not Pentium M. My mistake.
I was shopping for computer crap with a friend of mine in Japan, where they've got lots and lots of Transmeta based subnotebooks. So I started comparing. The Pentium Ms were okay. They ran pretty cool, but you could still feel the heat. The Transmeta machines, if you turned off the monitor, you probably wouldn't even know they were on.
Transmeta is cool.
The problem is that if a voting machine is programmed to cheat, it is easy enough to fake a paper receipt. I could cast a vote for A, have the screen verify that I am voting for A, receive a printed receipt that tells me I voted for A, and STILL have that vote count for B within the black box.
The paper trail is a red herring, if you ask me. What is really needed is publicly-available source code that anyone can view.
Open source woudn't be a bad idea.
But you totally misunderstand the idea of a paper trail. It's NOT the receipt that you get printed. It's like the printed record of a cash register. If THAT were visible to the voter as it was printed, and then stored securely, you would have a record that you could review if there were questions later on. Just like store managers do every day.
If you want it to be machine readable, you could have it print a bar code for each voting option chosen. For ease of readability in recounts, selected candidates could be in big bold print. It would help those with bad vision, too.
AND the voter could have a little printed receipt to take home, if they want. (Hey, you could even choose not to have one, just like an ATM. But gee, companies like Diebold don't have any expertise in THAT area, do they?)
It's not the monumental technological hurdle that the assholes who sell these machines claim. ATMs and cash registers have done it for ages. The only hurdle is one imposed by not designing such provisions in from the start, whether for cost-cutting reasons (or sales-inflating reasons, if you can sell upgrade kits later on), or out of right-wing conspiracy reasons.
Fucking....assholes. FUCK-ING-ASS-HOLES. Pretty soon the only way your vote will ever count is if you vote with bullets.
When the HELL is Docomo going to do something about their sound quality?
For YEARS it's been painful to try and talk to someone using an NTT Docomo phone. Sometimes you just want to tell them to go to a landline phone.
Screw those commie bastards, and screw their little wussy sattelite network.
It's not no one's fault, you know. You chose to live in a place built around cars, probably with little accomodation made for anything else. So did a lot of other people. The more people who do that the less options there are. Public transportation won't be improved because everyone has to have a car, so even when they don't need to use the car, they're more likely to do so anyway...the public transit won't be used enough to be good (a bus every hour and a half doesn't even count as having a system IMO...I lived somewhere like that). Not that there would be money to pay for it, with it all going to pay for the upkeep of roads.
Why should you, and all the other people who helped make the bed you all now have to sleep in have to pay for it? Because someone has to, or your whole system, which you are dependent upon, will collapse, or at least degrade.
On the plus side, the more of you who get frustrated with having to pay for your unhealthy, inefficient lifestyle, the more people will be clamoring for alternatives, and maybe suburbia will get some of it's problems fixed.
Me, if I can't find a job in one of the handful of US cities which ISN'T a fucking wreck when it comes to it's infrastructure choices, I'm staying overseas.
It gives a lone coder the ability to participate in larger projects if they want to, while using the work of the larger group as a basis for filling niches.
There has got to be SOMEONE out there making a living customizing open source software for specific needs, by himself (and lets not kid ourselves here, it's almost certainly HIMself).
I had the same problem with Kingdom of Loathing.
They're VERY important to me in a game like Grand Theft Auto. I like the exquisite detail of the stats in GTA3 and Vice City, but the wording and timing in the original GTA was beautiful. I would go around shooting pedestrians to see how high I could get my "murder one" count. (Displayed when you finally get killed)
As for the only other game I give a rat's ass about stats in: TFC...stats are nice, but the point systems used really don't differentiate or account for classes. A Soldier, Sniper or HWG, or on some maps Spy or Engineer can really rack up the kills. A pyro pretty much won't, and a medic, while actually accellerating many deaths greatly, usually doesn't get credited for their kills. Some method of accounting for assists would help those classes. Caps should be noted separately. (it would almost never help pyros or HWGs anyway, but they do bring up scores for spies, medics, and scouts)
OTOH, sometimes I wish there was no score kept when playing Dustbowl. That way people might be more inclined to work as a team instead of just going out to get as many kills as they can.
"If you don't like it, move to Russia."
...ignoring both the numerous other better examples AND the fact that they know fuck-all about how canada's health care system works)
There have always been a lot of americans who never look for GOOD comparisons when someone confronts them with a problem in or with the United States. My dad never uses anything but Mexico or Canada. (Think every conservative who says something like "Socialized medicine? You mean like what they have in Canada?"
It's easier to believe that US is the be all and end all when it comes to lifestyle ("highest standard of living"? If that means more of everything, perhaps, but is that always good?), if you never look at any other developed country for comparison.
That said, India and China are the major sticking points on the Kyoto Protocol, for the US, because they are now and will be in the future our major competitors. It would be foolish for the united states to agree to strict limitations on CO2 emissions when China and India don't have any. Even if they just put a cap on growth, that would go a long way to winning the US over. (Correct me if I'm wrong, of course, I haven't updated myself on this in a while)
The CIA program was a load of crap, and "Suspect Zero" was a terrible movie, too.
I throw away discs, but not all of them.
I just hope that these discs are marked. I'd consider them for short-term (less than a few months) backups, but not for something where I might want to hold onto it indefinitely. Of course, it's hard enough to find CDRs which can be trusted with important data for longer than a few months NOW.
"Permanent Death: Yes, a lot of game designers love this one. However, go make a list of the successful games with this 'feature'. It's short because people don't enjoy losing their investments. Permanent Death closes exactly one door. It does not open any that aren't already typically available to the players who want them."
RTFA-Again
He makes this point, that it doesn't happen because people wouldn't like it.
Except it WOULD open doors. It would open doors to anyone who gets their ass kicked relentlessly not because they suck, but because there are people who already have their characters built up who are waiting to kick their asses.
The only advantage early adoption would present is knowledge of the game. It would not GUARANTEE a super-powerful godlike character who can stomp all comers.
"Instanceing: This is an adequate solution to the crowding problem. A better one is to provide sufficiently breadth not to need instanceing. Build a game without need for instanceing and you'll have a hit, guaranteed."
People might still want it, though.
Also, you'd need to have a world which scales to the number of players, or which has areas which attract players who don't want that privacy, without depriving them of anything else. You couldn't just make a HUGE fricking world. Otherwise, you'd have it too full (like you're talking about) or too empty, either when the game starts or during off-peak hours. No one wants to play an unpopulated online game. Well, not usually.
I'd have to agree with you on the teleportation part, though. There are other solutions to that problem if you just find teleportation aesthetically displeasing though.
Screw those commie bastards, and screw their little wussy space station.