Bad time to be the FNG
on
Myth II Updated
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· Score: 3, Funny
Myth would be one of the worst games to be the FNG. I don't know how many times a wight has managed to get too close for comfort, despite my archers. Quickly picking out somebody with no battle honors, the veterans tell him to, "Go kill that thing, be a man." Then they duck, because big chunks of exploding wight and a red splatter (that used to be the new guy) are inbound.
In my teenage years I often worked with my father during the summer. He was a private contractor, did everything from building houses to putting on siding.
A lot of what I have seen of "bad house syndrome" was caused by either human error or nature.
One woman had asthma problems every year around the same time (early spring). She said it was the heat baking some chemical out of her roof (or something). A look into her heating and air system showed a lot of built up dust. So, it could have been a mold or mildew that went crazy around that time of year. Cleaned the air system and the danker sections of the house - her problem disappeared.
Another house had problems with a child being sick, especially after he had been in the basement. It turned out that the supports down there were full of termites. Apparently the kid was allergic to something produced by the termites.
Then there is human error. One new house (not Dad's work, he was called in) had a distinct chemical smell. During the construction somebody had spilled something and it had soaked into the subfloor.
Honestly, a house with the correct setup does circulate the air pretty well. Plus, while building material may give off fumes for years, how much exactly are we talking about? Even in nature we are constantly subjected to small amounts of all sorts of things. The key is amount. Here is some information about formaldehyde from the EPA: http://www.epa.gov/iaq/formalde.html. In fact, check out their whole section about indoor air quality.
I watch as everyone jumps on the bandwagon that the United States' space program sucks. All because we have not returned to the moon.
Okay, our manned missions have become fairly lax, but NASA's unmanned missions are doing a fair job of making up for it. Just check the current list: http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/
Plus, the Hubble and Chandra are doing real good work - in Earth orbit.
Well MY 386 with 64Meg of RAM is handling 1 000 000 users just great with over 1 billion messages per day, and I still play tetris on it at lunch breaks.
You play games on your mailserver? Boy, does that ever explain a lot of the weird porn spam I have been getting lately. Would you mind not playing so much Dig-Dug? Please?
From what I understand, they are seizing these after being given a standing "Good to Go" (on any such sites) from a judge.
I keep having to point this out lately, but here is part of the Bill of Rights again:
Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." George W. Bush, December 18, 2002
Uh, do you have any sort of reputable reference for that quote? (And I don't mean www.wehatebush.com.) Where, why, how it was used? I see plenty of pages that use such quote, but with different dates. It seems mighty fishy to me.
I think that you need to pay more attention to the Bill of Rights:
Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
And, just in case you do not think gathering evidence applies there, let me throw this one at you:
Amendment IX The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, just because the Constitution does not say you have the right to privacy does not mean you are denied such a right. It only means that the founding fathers did not foresee the requirement to say, "You have the right to privacy."
For instance, despite how easy it is for anyone to start a Slashdot or Fark ripoff site no one commands as much traffic in their genre as either site.
You mean that any new site will have fewer visitors than an older, established one? Wow, that is amazing. I never would have realized that.
Oh, by the way, try complaining about not being able to make an instantly popular site while someone else starts working on theirs. In six months we can check and see who has more readers.
Sorry, but it annoyed me. If our distant ancestors had adhered to such ideas, we would all still be living in the same cave.
I do not use them for coasters, but they make great throwing stars. Get a whole stack of them, burst into the workspace, and start dolling out flung death.
Not recommended in china shops and try not to hit anyone in the face.
Thanks for the background. The question burning in my mind is, if this is "standard procedure," how do you people sleep at night? Also, if you are Catholic, exactly how much time do you spend in a confessional each week?
"Ah, the new campaign is ready. 10,000 Hail Marys..."
H3XA said: "Sure they block my access to Geocities and BBC but I don't see that as a bad thing."
Yes, but wouldn't you like to make that choice for yourself? Surely, if there is nothing on Geocities or the BBC that you want to read, then there is no need for someone to block your access in the first place.
I much prefer making decisions for myself; it was one of the big reasons for growing up.
Wake up! Microsoft went through great pains to make IE the dominant browser, using every trick they could to kill Netscape at the time. Now, with their monopoly almost complete, they start redirecting you to their search page (rather than returning a 404) and trying to insert their own advertising into webpage articles I WRITE. Thank goodness public outcry stopped the latter from happening.
Microsoft didn't create Internet Explorer out of the goodness of their hearts. Let me put it this way: "One browser to rule them all. One browser to find them. One browser to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."
I mean, a company's goal in life is not preserving freedom and liberty, it's making money.
He really, really tried to make a good argument, but that is useless when your basic premise is stupid. Hopefully Jon's next essay will be on eating mud; that's something I can get behind.
Go ahead, call me a troll. It's still a dumb essay.
Having read through a number of your posts (see his profile), I'm pretty darn certain you are a troll. However, since a number of your posts are also being moderated, on account of their amazing insight of course, I feel a reply is in order.
First off, let me quote Bin Laden twice for you:
"We with God's help call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill Americans and plunder their money whenever and wherever they find it. We also call on Muslims . . . to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them."
AND
"Our enemy is every American male, whether he is directly fighting us or paying taxes."
Now, along the lines of American companies making a profit from displacing governments. That would explain the billions that America invested into helping Japan and Europe rebuild after WWII and the millions being obligated right now for humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan. I'm sorry, I think that from an accounting standpoint we can safely assume our war on terrorism will be well into the red. That is not the point.
In fact, come to think of it, a number of your arguments display massive ignorance of the mechanics behind (and following) WWII. For example: the Japanese people were devout to their emperor. The American casualties involved in attacking the Japanese mainland would have been staggering. We didn't ask for Japan to (without warning) attack Pearl Harbor, nor was the decision to use that weapon against a city an easy one. But, we destroyed the first city and asked them to surrender - they refused. We dropped the second device and finally Japan agreed to our terms of surrender.
Lastly, on the subject of young Japanese women raped by American servicemen. The American military is drawn directly from the ranks of its citizens. Unfortunately, this means that we do get bad apples, even after extensive efforts to weed them out. I'd love to see a study of the occurrence of rape, among the American population at large and then among just military members. Which is higher I wonder? The Marines in Okinawa live under very strict rules, believe me.
Several thousand Americans died because of the efforts of extremists (even Bin Laden's family hates him) and we have been patient with those sheltering the guilty. Words are cheap, peace has the highest price of all.
The final thought I'll leave you with is this: go to Afghanistan (you know, the country you are sticking up for) and try bad mouthing the Taliban; see how long your head stays attached to your body.
For some reason JK can often get my blood up with his long winded dissertations that completely ignore some common sense issues.
Mind you, I've a thick patriotic streak, but we are talking about an EP-3 "ramming" a F-8 fighter. Correct? Let me give you a clue, the EP-3 is a large lumbering aircraft (it is based off a submarine hunting plane) with four props and a top speed of about Mach 0.7 or so. The F-8 is a jet fighter able to ding around Mach 2.2.
I personally blame the EP-3's captain for this whole mess. It is true that landing at an airport was a safe choice for the crew, but he should have ditched his aircraft in international waters. Right now we would still have a minor mess, but a US task force would be parked over the sunken plane and any surviving crew members would be home with their families. Oh, and China wouldn't be stripping advanced electronics off one of our premiere intelligence birds.
A little misconception here. To my understanding ISPs will not have a "static" Carnivore box. Instead what happens is that the agents will identify the ISP(s) to be tapped and show up with the Carnivore box to be installed while the investigation is going on.
Or has something passed under my radar about this?
Andrew Borntreger
Not going to miss them
on
Scour is Dead
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· Score: 1
Some time ago, when they first started, being indexed by them turned into a DOS attack on my website for all intents and purposes. Despite running on a T1 even!
People weren't reading the reviews, but everyone was downloading mpegs. It took a look at the referrer logs to figure out what the heck was going on.
To make matters worse, they didn't have the name of their robot posted (it's SCOUR, duh - smacking of forehead, but so many robots are named different) to put in the robots.txt file.
We need good search engines, but ones only looking for certain files are a bane to webmasters.
You beat me to the punch, I'd also like to add getting a (good) safe large enough to store the laptop in. If it's a desktop with information that critical it needs to have a removable hard drive that you can lock up in the safe.
If someone is not physically using that laptop or desktop it (laptop or removable hard drive) should be locked up in the safe and the safe should be in a secure room as well.
Moan about the pain in the rear this is all that you want, now moan that someone stole whatever information from you company that ruins everything. Which moan sounds the worst?
We'll just end up using all of our air to fuel our cars. Then the French will have to design a spaceworthy version of the Statue of Liberty so we can steal all the air from another planet with an atmosphere.
Let's just hope the superintelligent manta rays of that world haven't a clue what is going to happen.
I'm moderately doubtful about the fact that first person shooters can prepare someone for using a real firearm. Let me explain further though.
There is no recoil, nor the really sharp report of that round going down range. Plus you have all sorts of other issues to worry about: natural point of aim, bone support, sight alignment, sight picture, breathing, guessing the wind, etc. In general the mantra of firing a weapon and knowing you will hit that target where you aimed and if you don't - you know exactly why.
I'll agree that perhaps the general familiarity with the situation could help make a newbie less nervous, but of much anything else I have to disagree. For my qualifications to say this, I am a Marine SSgt with expert qualification (not hard to do at all, just do the mantra) and have put over 10,000 rounds downrange through my competition.45 and.22 pistols.
I knew that my father's rifle was right behind the front door and I often was in fights with the bullies at school. Never did the thought cross my mind to pick up that weapon and shoot my tormentors. See a fox after the chickens or something like that and it was a very dead fox, but you settled your problems with other boys through a manly exchange of fists.
Perhaps we are restricting the kids too much these days? I mean, get in a fight and you are looking at a week's suspension - not the detention (or in the case of very violent scuffles - one day of suspension) of my high school days.
So could a kid get the idea of running through school with a firearm and shooting people from a video game? Sure, but I think someone brought up to cherish certain values (and friends can be just as important as family) can make all the difference.
Just my thoughts, I haven't the slightest bit of higher learning in human behavior. This is coming from someone who started playing first person shooters with Wolfenstein, though mom and dad taught me this:
Try to avoid fights, but if you can not - knock their block off.
Slashdot Mirror
Myth would be one of the worst games to be the FNG. I don't know how many times a wight has managed to get too close for comfort, despite my archers. Quickly picking out somebody with no battle honors, the veterans tell him to, "Go kill that thing, be a man." Then they duck, because big chunks of exploding wight and a red splatter (that used to be the new guy) are inbound.
In my teenage years I often worked with my father during the summer. He was a private contractor, did everything from building houses to putting on siding.
A lot of what I have seen of "bad house syndrome" was caused by either human error or nature.
One woman had asthma problems every year around the same time (early spring). She said it was the heat baking some chemical out of her roof (or something). A look into her heating and air system showed a lot of built up dust. So, it could have been a mold or mildew that went crazy around that time of year. Cleaned the air system and the danker sections of the house - her problem disappeared.
Another house had problems with a child being sick, especially after he had been in the basement. It turned out that the supports down there were full of termites. Apparently the kid was allergic to something produced by the termites.
Then there is human error. One new house (not Dad's work, he was called in) had a distinct chemical smell. During the construction somebody had spilled something and it had soaked into the subfloor.
Honestly, a house with the correct setup does circulate the air pretty well. Plus, while building material may give off fumes for years, how much exactly are we talking about? Even in nature we are constantly subjected to small amounts of all sorts of things. The key is amount. Here is some information about formaldehyde from the EPA: http://www.epa.gov/iaq/formalde.html. In fact, check out their whole section about indoor air quality.
I watch as everyone jumps on the bandwagon that the United States' space program sucks. All because we have not returned to the moon.
Okay, our manned missions have become fairly lax, but NASA's unmanned missions are doing a fair job of making up for it. Just check the current list: http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/
Plus, the Hubble and Chandra are doing real good work - in Earth orbit.
Well MY 386 with 64Meg of RAM is handling 1 000 000 users just great with over 1 billion messages per day, and I still play tetris on it at lunch breaks.
You play games on your mailserver? Boy, does that ever explain a lot of the weird porn spam I have been getting lately. Would you mind not playing so much Dig-Dug? Please?
From what I understand, they are seizing these after being given a standing "Good to Go" (on any such sites) from a judge.
I keep having to point this out lately, but here is part of the Bill of Rights again:
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
Really? Microsoft provides updates for ALL software? Every program ever made?
Wow.
"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
George W. Bush, December 18, 2002
Uh, do you have any sort of reputable reference for that quote? (And I don't mean www.wehatebush.com.) Where, why, how it was used? I see plenty of pages that use such quote, but with different dates. It seems mighty fishy to me.
I think that you need to pay more attention to the Bill of Rights:
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
And, just in case you do not think gathering evidence applies there, let me throw this one at you:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, just because the Constitution does not say you have the right to privacy does not mean you are denied such a right. It only means that the founding fathers did not foresee the requirement to say, "You have the right to privacy."
For instance, despite how easy it is for anyone to start a Slashdot or Fark ripoff site no one commands as much traffic in their genre as either site.
You mean that any new site will have fewer visitors than an older, established one? Wow, that is amazing. I never would have realized that.
Oh, by the way, try complaining about not being able to make an instantly popular site while someone else starts working on theirs. In six months we can check and see who has more readers.
Sorry, but it annoyed me. If our distant ancestors had adhered to such ideas, we would all still be living in the same cave.
I do not use them for coasters, but they make great throwing stars. Get a whole stack of them, burst into the workspace, and start dolling out flung death.
Not recommended in china shops and try not to hit anyone in the face.
Thanks for the background. The question burning in my mind is, if this is "standard procedure," how do you people sleep at night? Also, if you are Catholic, exactly how much time do you spend in a confessional each week?
"Ah, the new campaign is ready. 10,000 Hail Marys..."
Digital-Web.com found that 100% of their bandwidth was not enough when another, already obsolete, website Slashdotted them.
H3XA said:
"Sure they block my access to Geocities and BBC but I don't see that as a bad thing."
Yes, but wouldn't you like to make that choice for yourself? Surely, if there is nothing on Geocities or the BBC that you want to read, then there is no need for someone to block your access in the first place.
I much prefer making decisions for myself; it was one of the big reasons for growing up.
It's free? Well, I guess everything is okay then.
Wake up! Microsoft went through great pains to make IE the dominant browser, using every trick they could to kill Netscape at the time. Now, with their monopoly almost complete, they start redirecting you to their search page (rather than returning a 404) and trying to insert their own advertising into webpage articles I WRITE. Thank goodness public outcry stopped the latter from happening.
Microsoft didn't create Internet Explorer out of the goodness of their hearts. Let me put it this way: "One browser to rule them all. One browser to find them. One browser to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."
...has any clue of how the world works.
I mean, a company's goal in life is not preserving freedom and liberty, it's making money.
He really, really tried to make a good argument, but that is useless when your basic premise is stupid. Hopefully Jon's next essay will be on eating mud; that's something I can get behind.
Go ahead, call me a troll. It's still a dumb essay.
I was going to moderate, but really feel the need to say something about free speech.
Free Speech != the ability to say anything you want. It is the ability to express yourself in a way that does not infringe on the rights of others.
'Nuff said.
Having read through a number of your posts (see his profile), I'm pretty darn certain you are a troll. However, since a number of your posts are also being moderated, on account of their amazing insight of course, I feel a reply is in order.
First off, let me quote Bin Laden twice for you:
"We with God's help call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill Americans and plunder their money whenever and wherever they find it. We also call on Muslims . . . to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them."
AND
"Our enemy is every American male, whether he is directly fighting us or paying taxes."
Now, along the lines of American companies making a profit from displacing governments. That would explain the billions that America invested into helping Japan and Europe rebuild after WWII and the millions being obligated right now for humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan. I'm sorry, I think that from an accounting standpoint we can safely assume our war on terrorism will be well into the red. That is not the point.
In fact, come to think of it, a number of your arguments display massive ignorance of the mechanics behind (and following) WWII. For example: the Japanese people were devout to their emperor. The American casualties involved in attacking the Japanese mainland would have been staggering. We didn't ask for Japan to (without warning) attack Pearl Harbor, nor was the decision to use that weapon against a city an easy one. But, we destroyed the first city and asked them to surrender - they refused. We dropped the second device and finally Japan agreed to our terms of surrender.
Lastly, on the subject of young Japanese women raped by American servicemen. The American military is drawn directly from the ranks of its citizens. Unfortunately, this means that we do get bad apples, even after extensive efforts to weed them out. I'd love to see a study of the occurrence of rape, among the American population at large and then among just military members. Which is higher I wonder? The Marines in Okinawa live under very strict rules, believe me.
Several thousand Americans died because of the efforts of extremists (even Bin Laden's family hates him) and we have been patient with those sheltering the guilty. Words are cheap, peace has the highest price of all.
The final thought I'll leave you with is this: go to Afghanistan (you know, the country you are sticking up for) and try bad mouthing the Taliban; see how long your head stays attached to your body.
For some reason JK can often get my blood up with his long winded dissertations that completely ignore some common sense issues.
Mind you, I've a thick patriotic streak, but we are talking about an EP-3 "ramming" a F-8 fighter. Correct? Let me give you a clue, the EP-3 is a large lumbering aircraft (it is based off a submarine hunting plane) with four props and a top speed of about Mach 0.7 or so. The F-8 is a jet fighter able to ding around Mach 2.2.
I personally blame the EP-3's captain for this whole mess. It is true that landing at an airport was a safe choice for the crew, but he should have ditched his aircraft in international waters. Right now we would still have a minor mess, but a US task force would be parked over the sunken plane and any surviving crew members would be home with their families. Oh, and China wouldn't be stripping advanced electronics off one of our premiere intelligence birds.
Andrew Borntreger
A little misconception here. To my understanding ISPs will not have a "static" Carnivore box. Instead what happens is that the agents will identify the ISP(s) to be tapped and show up with the Carnivore box to be installed while the investigation is going on.
Or has something passed under my radar about this?
Andrew Borntreger
Some time ago, when they first started, being indexed by them turned into a DOS attack on my website for all intents and purposes. Despite running on a T1 even!
People weren't reading the reviews, but everyone was downloading mpegs. It took a look at the referrer logs to figure out what the heck was going on.
To make matters worse, they didn't have the name of their robot posted (it's SCOUR, duh - smacking of forehead, but so many robots are named different) to put in the robots.txt file.
We need good search engines, but ones only looking for certain files are a bane to webmasters.
Andrew Borntreger
You beat me to the punch, I'd also like to add getting a (good) safe large enough to store the laptop in. If it's a desktop with information that critical it needs to have a removable hard drive that you can lock up in the safe.
If someone is not physically using that laptop or desktop it (laptop or removable hard drive) should be locked up in the safe and the safe should be in a secure room as well.
Moan about the pain in the rear this is all that you want, now moan that someone stole whatever information from you company that ruins everything. Which moan sounds the worst?
Andrew Borntreger
We'll just end up using all of our air to fuel our cars. Then the French will have to design a spaceworthy version of the Statue of Liberty so we can steal all the air from another planet with an atmosphere.
Let's just hope the superintelligent manta rays of that world haven't a clue what is going to happen.
Andrew Borntreger
Yeah! And somebody let the solar system know about the new "no littering" law on Mars. Damn thing has been dumping its crap there for years.
I'm an eco-terrorist myself, but one with common sense.
Andrew Borntreger
I'm moderately doubtful about the fact that first person shooters can prepare someone for using a real firearm. Let me explain further though.
.45 and .22 pistols.
There is no recoil, nor the really sharp report of that round going down range. Plus you have all sorts of other issues to worry about: natural point of aim, bone support, sight alignment, sight picture, breathing, guessing the wind, etc. In general the mantra of firing a weapon and knowing you will hit that target where you aimed and if you don't - you know exactly why.
I'll agree that perhaps the general familiarity with the situation could help make a newbie less nervous, but of much anything else I have to disagree. For my qualifications to say this, I am a Marine SSgt with expert qualification (not hard to do at all, just do the mantra) and have put over 10,000 rounds downrange through my competition
Andrew Borntreger
I knew that my father's rifle was right behind the front door and I often was in fights with the bullies at school. Never did the thought cross my mind to pick up that weapon and shoot my tormentors. See a fox after the chickens or something like that and it was a very dead fox, but you settled your problems with other boys through a manly exchange of fists.
Perhaps we are restricting the kids too much these days? I mean, get in a fight and you are looking at a week's suspension - not the detention (or in the case of very violent scuffles - one day of suspension) of my high school days.
So could a kid get the idea of running through school with a firearm and shooting people from a video game? Sure, but I think someone brought up to cherish certain values (and friends can be just as important as family) can make all the difference.
Just my thoughts, I haven't the slightest bit of higher learning in human behavior. This is coming from someone who started playing first person shooters with Wolfenstein, though mom and dad taught me this: Try to avoid fights, but if you can not - knock their block off.
Andrew Borntreger