Well, let me start by explaining that the Swedish Parliament contains seven parties with more than the 4% of votes required for parliament.
That makes the Pirate Party the third biggest party outside of the parliament.
"(mp/ri)aa will flood the various file sharing networks with dummy files, aka 'master_of_puppets.mp3' that are actualy null files of a certain size."
Does that actually work in US law?
We had a case like that here in Sweden recently: someone found a backpack filled with drugs in a basement somewhere. The police replaced the drugs with flour and waited to see who was going to pick it up.
Someone picked it up and got arrested. He was quickly released, since he denied any knowledge about drugs (and the backpack didn't contain any when he took it), and "possession of flour" isn't a crime.
Seriously, that's nearly enough stuff for a small expansion pack right there.
I bought the game this Monday -- I finished the (admittedly short) main story about clearing up the three gangs yesterday. I got pleasantly surprised discovering that this DLC hits tonight!
Have you seen what happened when there's lots of bots around?
There's a quest in Stranglethorn Vale where you need gorilla fangs to complete a quest. When I did it it took me about two hours when it should have taken 30 minutes - since there were eight bots there running around killing all the gorillas. They didn't care about the quest, they were just interested in the experience points from farming gorillas 24/7.
I play on an RP server, meaning you're not flagged for PVP by default. I see tons of bots. Nearly all of them are hunters. They're easy to spot: they seem to glitch around like they lag real bad, they nearly always have an unnamed boar as a pet, and if you check them in the armory they wear all BOE gear with agility.
Some of them are even guilded; which makes me wonder if they're either someone paying for powerleveling, or just someone who got their account hacked. Probably the latter; if they're powerleveling they'd leave the area once they don't get experience points there any longer. Most don't.
I have yet to see a bot actually get banned. If they're Horde like me I add them to my friends list to see when they're online, and they're still there, weeks after I've reported them.
It does, however, become a problem when there are five bots literally cleaning out entire areas making it impossible for the ordinary players to do their own quests there. And that's not exaggerating; I've seen it myself. If I wasn't on an RP server I'd attack them on sight if they were of the opposing faction.
I frequent a large gaming forum, and I hear there have been lots of shady-looking bans over the last couple of days. One guy had two accounts - one of them got permanently closed for "running third-party applications", despite him stating he ran both accounts on the same computer, with the same UI mods.
Another person got banned for disenchanting all the items on one of his characters and mailing them to another character on the same account.
There are several Swedish web shops that sell the GW range. If GW tried to stop them our consumer protection agencies would fine them so big and hard they'd never try it again.
Random sidenote: the Penny Arcade forums (where I also hang around) are organizing a guild for the Warhammer MMO. That strip gave us the name: The Six Mouths! (Or "Da six moufs" for greenskins)
Well, Warhammer had unit champions way before W3 was even planned. And they're not at all like the unique Warcraft characters; each unit can have a champion. They're kinda like squad leaders.
And it works just fine. You select one or more items, place them in escrow at a space station, and select a buyer (that can be either a specific player; a specific corporation; or anyone), and decide a price.
You can have a look at the items that are placed in escrow so you know that you get what you pay for, but you have to pay to get the items. The selling player then gets the money.
It's pretty common with escrow scams, though. But they target players who don't check the items they "buy" via escrow before they click the buy button, so this is an actual part of the game, just like the piracy in some systems. It's a rough world in EVE.
Oh, just you wait. The serious spammers only target blogs with a good (6+) PageRank in Google. Then renaming mt-comments.cgi doesn't change anything at all.
Sorry, but renaming mt-comments.cgi to something else takes a spammer all of two seconds to bypass. They just sniff for the text field names in the comment form, and find out the name of the comment handler that way.
I'm a user at TextDrive, and a bunch of users and admins there have a mailing list where we are VERY aggressive in defeating spam. mod_security is great for blocking based on the contents of a POST payload ("contains texas holdem? Sorry, you get an Error 412.") and mod_dosevasive, which is great for hindering a mini-DDoS of comment spam.
Every addition to the block lists is peer-reviewed by the members of the mailing list, to make sure that we only catch spam, and not innocent comments.
We've pretty much put a stop to comment and referral spam on TextDrive thanks to this effort.
Word. Yesterday I heard a horror story about a visit to the shrink costing $500 for some guy in the US. That sounds way exaggerated and I have no idea if that was a true story, but I'm certain it's more expensive to see a shrink in the US than here in Sweden.
I've had a depression since 1997. At times it's so bad that I need to talk to a psychiatrist about it.
At that time it was so bad that I had to go to the psychiatric emergency ward, and the doctor booked a meeting with a psychiatrist the next week. That's standard medical practice here in Sweden for people under 26 years of age. The first visit cost me 240 SEK ($33.50 according to current exchange rates). After that, 70 SEK ($9.76) per visit, once a week. (Another 240 SEK for the trip to the emergency ward.)
I checked again some weeks ago, and if I want a non-emergency meeting, there's 4-7 weeks of waiting time before you can see someone for the initial session.
There are private clinics as well, of course. But I'm just a student, so I can't afford those. But if it's an emergency, it feels good to know that I get prioritized and don't have to feel like crap for seven weeks before I can get help.
Direct Connect is incredibly large here in Sweden. People don't bother with Kazaa; it's all about DC here.
All you need to do is download DC++ or oDC, update the hublist (takes all of one click), find some hub and start downloading. It takes all of 20-30 minutes to grab a 700MB game.
In "Chasm City" by Alastair Reynolds, a character gets an "eye shine", by adding some snake DNA to his eyes so they grow a reflective coating inside of the eye, giving him better night vision by bouncing the light several times against the receptors -- with the minor disadvantage that it makes his eye glow like a cat's. Sort of like Riddick's.
Riddick apparently can't turn his shine job on/off at will in Pitch Black, but he can in the game (though that may just be an abstraction of him removing his goggles).
In Chasm City, Cahuella is able to engage/disengage it by triggering "local cancer growths" that add/remove the eye shine in a few days.
Pitch Black is from 2000. Chasm City is from 2001. And I doubt either of them is the first with the idea of eye shines. (I recommend Alastair Reynolds if you like hard sci-fi.)
The Riddick game is damn good. I finished it yesterday, and today I started replaying it to find a few things I missed or didn't try the first time through. I rarely replay games that quick after finishing them.
There's a few parts in the game where you can advance the plot in several ways. Both of them have the same outcome, but the path is way different. I like that.
If you have an Xbox, give this game a spin. Rent it, at the very least.
This movie reminded me of all the stuff they were planning to have in the game, but had to cut for one reason or other. There was initially supposed to be a shitload of more weapons, like a sword for the Chief (you see them in the movie), as well as native wildlife on the Halo.
Most of the stuff was extremely cool. Too bad they had to cut it. I remember seeing an old movie where the Warthog drove through a small flock of critters that scattered and fled.
Slashdot Mirror
And I hear that Global Frequency got axed and buried precisely because the pilot got leaked and was incredibly popular on P2P networks.
The minds of movie execs move in mysterious ways.
Well, let me start by explaining that the Swedish Parliament contains seven parties with more than the 4% of votes required for parliament. That makes the Pirate Party the third biggest party outside of the parliament.
NDA is lifted now.
http://pulseblack.com/
They've been doing this for a long long time with CDs. Very nice record label.
"(mp/ri)aa will flood the various file sharing networks with dummy files, aka 'master_of_puppets.mp3' that are actualy null files of a certain size."
Does that actually work in US law?
We had a case like that here in Sweden recently: someone found a backpack filled with drugs in a basement somewhere. The police replaced the drugs with flour and waited to see who was going to pick it up.
Someone picked it up and got arrested. He was quickly released, since he denied any knowledge about drugs (and the backpack didn't contain any when he took it), and "possession of flour" isn't a crime.
Seriously, that's nearly enough stuff for a small expansion pack right there.
I bought the game this Monday -- I finished the (admittedly short) main story about clearing up the three gangs yesterday. I got pleasantly surprised discovering that this DLC hits tonight!
Have you seen what happened when there's lots of bots around?
There's a quest in Stranglethorn Vale where you need gorilla fangs to complete a quest. When I did it it took me about two hours when it should have taken 30 minutes - since there were eight bots there running around killing all the gorillas. They didn't care about the quest, they were just interested in the experience points from farming gorillas 24/7.
THAT is how bots destroy for other players.
I play on an RP server, meaning you're not flagged for PVP by default. I see tons of bots. Nearly all of them are hunters. They're easy to spot: they seem to glitch around like they lag real bad, they nearly always have an unnamed boar as a pet, and if you check them in the armory they wear all BOE gear with agility.
Some of them are even guilded; which makes me wonder if they're either someone paying for powerleveling, or just someone who got their account hacked. Probably the latter; if they're powerleveling they'd leave the area once they don't get experience points there any longer. Most don't.
I have yet to see a bot actually get banned. If they're Horde like me I add them to my friends list to see when they're online, and they're still there, weeks after I've reported them.
It does, however, become a problem when there are five bots literally cleaning out entire areas making it impossible for the ordinary players to do their own quests there. And that's not exaggerating; I've seen it myself. If I wasn't on an RP server I'd attack them on sight if they were of the opposing faction.
I frequent a large gaming forum, and I hear there have been lots of shady-looking bans over the last couple of days. One guy had two accounts - one of them got permanently closed for "running third-party applications", despite him stating he ran both accounts on the same computer, with the same UI mods.
Another person got banned for disenchanting all the items on one of his characters and mailing them to another character on the same account.
Or so I've been told by people who demo the card game.
There are several Swedish web shops that sell the GW range. If GW tried to stop them our consumer protection agencies would fine them so big and hard they'd never try it again.
Random sidenote: the Penny Arcade forums (where I also hang around) are organizing a guild for the Warhammer MMO. That strip gave us the name: The Six Mouths! (Or "Da six moufs" for greenskins)
Well, Warhammer had unit champions way before W3 was even planned. And they're not at all like the unique Warcraft characters; each unit can have a champion. They're kinda like squad leaders.
And it works just fine. You select one or more items, place them in escrow at a space station, and select a buyer (that can be either a specific player; a specific corporation; or anyone), and decide a price.
You can have a look at the items that are placed in escrow so you know that you get what you pay for, but you have to pay to get the items. The selling player then gets the money.
It's pretty common with escrow scams, though. But they target players who don't check the items they "buy" via escrow before they click the buy button, so this is an actual part of the game, just like the piracy in some systems. It's a rough world in EVE.
Oh, just you wait. The serious spammers only target blogs with a good (6+) PageRank in Google. Then renaming mt-comments.cgi doesn't change anything at all.
Sorry, but renaming mt-comments.cgi to something else takes a spammer all of two seconds to bypass. They just sniff for the text field names in the comment form, and find out the name of the comment handler that way.
I'm a user at TextDrive, and a bunch of users and admins there have a mailing list where we are VERY aggressive in defeating spam. mod_security is great for blocking based on the contents of a POST payload ("contains texas holdem? Sorry, you get an Error 412.") and mod_dosevasive, which is great for hindering a mini-DDoS of comment spam.
Every addition to the block lists is peer-reviewed by the members of the mailing list, to make sure that we only catch spam, and not innocent comments.
We've pretty much put a stop to comment and referral spam on TextDrive thanks to this effort.
Word. Yesterday I heard a horror story about a visit to the shrink costing $500 for some guy in the US. That sounds way exaggerated and I have no idea if that was a true story, but I'm certain it's more expensive to see a shrink in the US than here in Sweden.
I've had a depression since 1997. At times it's so bad that I need to talk to a psychiatrist about it.
At that time it was so bad that I had to go to the psychiatric emergency ward, and the doctor booked a meeting with a psychiatrist the next week. That's standard medical practice here in Sweden for people under 26 years of age. The first visit cost me 240 SEK ($33.50 according to current exchange rates). After that, 70 SEK ($9.76) per visit, once a week. (Another 240 SEK for the trip to the emergency ward.)
I checked again some weeks ago, and if I want a non-emergency meeting, there's 4-7 weeks of waiting time before you can see someone for the initial session.
There are private clinics as well, of course. But I'm just a student, so I can't afford those. But if it's an emergency, it feels good to know that I get prioritized and don't have to feel like crap for seven weeks before I can get help.
And my file server (P3 450MHz) was up and running in less than an hour with Gentoo.
I installed a stage 3. You don't have to compile everything from scratch just because you can.
My picture gallery sorts pictures by date embedded in the EXIF metadata of the picture, and has done so for years.
Direct Connect is incredibly large here in Sweden. People don't bother with Kazaa; it's all about DC here.
All you need to do is download DC++ or oDC, update the hublist (takes all of one click), find some hub and start downloading. It takes all of 20-30 minutes to grab a 700MB game.
I didn't think Pitch Black explained his eyes at all, other than Riddick saying that he "paid a slam preacher 20 Menthols for them".
It's hinted pretty heavily in the game that there is something else pulling Riddick's strings.
He's listed at several places in the credits. Not quite director, but he was directly involved in the plot and story of the game.
Riddick speaks of his "shine job" in Pitch Black.
In "Chasm City" by Alastair Reynolds, a character gets an "eye shine", by adding some snake DNA to his eyes so they grow a reflective coating inside of the eye, giving him better night vision by bouncing the light several times against the receptors -- with the minor disadvantage that it makes his eye glow like a cat's. Sort of like Riddick's.
Riddick apparently can't turn his shine job on/off at will in Pitch Black, but he can in the game (though that may just be an abstraction of him removing his goggles).
In Chasm City, Cahuella is able to engage/disengage it by triggering "local cancer growths" that add/remove the eye shine in a few days.
Pitch Black is from 2000. Chasm City is from 2001. And I doubt either of them is the first with the idea of eye shines. (I recommend Alastair Reynolds if you like hard sci-fi.)
The Riddick game is damn good. I finished it yesterday, and today I started replaying it to find a few things I missed or didn't try the first time through. I rarely replay games that quick after finishing them.
There's a few parts in the game where you can advance the plot in several ways. Both of them have the same outcome, but the path is way different. I like that.
If you have an Xbox, give this game a spin. Rent it, at the very least.
This movie reminded me of all the stuff they were planning to have in the game, but had to cut for one reason or other. There was initially supposed to be a shitload of more weapons, like a sword for the Chief (you see them in the movie), as well as native wildlife on the Halo.
Most of the stuff was extremely cool. Too bad they had to cut it. I remember seeing an old movie where the Warthog drove through a small flock of critters that scattered and fled.