Round last summer, this cute college doll I was doin' that week or two introduced me to a lil' game called The Sims, which needless to say ended up sucking a fat load of time out of my cushy webmaster job. We'd be playin' the game together late in the morning nearly every day, watching curiously as we made our lil Sims eat, work, play, even mess around with each other (that's the funniest part, even if it ain't as good as the real thing). But what most captured the interest of she and I was the neato house building and furniture options. I got this large money shot cheat off a game tips site, and we'd keep spending the dough to play around with housing options. My favorite houses was the ones we designed based on the Playboy mansion and this dance club one we made.
After a while I grew weary of the game, but my gal took such a fancy to the interior design feature that she decided to drop out of SUNY, and join design school to get an interior decorating job. I moved on to better things since, but when I last talked to her she was having a big ol' blast at design school, all thanks to a few weeks of the Sims! I usually dun think that much of games to be tellin the truth, but that Sims game is all right!
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Man, I'd have to take that with a freaking 12 pound bag of salt. You can tell he has no clue what he's doing just by looking at his "beautiful" female assistants for the article. Hell, I'd rather put my dick in a blender than any of those nasty old hens. Seriously, man, you want to try to attract a good looking woman (or even a non-hideous one). And as a guy who's had more sex than Bruce Perens has imposters (I'm an ex-porn star, so most of it was work though:), I have to say that not only is his whole guide skewed by the grossness and inaccuracy of his female assistants, none of those tricks work unless you're dealing with some pathetic 50 year old woman who's trying to get married so she doesn't alone. I dunno though, at least ESR's guide to getting gargoyles may work if you have one of those genetic diseases where you'll die if you don't have sex with an ugly woman in 24 hours.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
I think the whole community has been sick of AOL picking up companies such as ICQ and just prick-teasing us with idle promises of opening it up. I'm kind of doubtful as to how much AOL will actually put out, especially having looked at the age and size limits in their "agreement." Nonetheless, at least AOL is making some effort to allow ICQ to be examined and probed vigorously by programmers and source code readers, and I think this will benefit both users and the company's reputation in the long run. As another thought, perhaps AOL is tossing the community a small bone in attempt to cover up/improve its image after all the raping of consumers and software technologies it has done.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Clearly the industry and Hack SDMI trying to whore the hacking community through this project. Of course they want hackers to get deep inside and penetrate their carefully constructed code. The hope is that this repeated and constant probing will somehow allow the code to increase its endurance and better survive the pounding it will take when released on a consumer market.
Not that hacking shouldnt occur: of course we want our best hackers to be up and ready to vigorously slam whatever is cranked out by the industry. But for Christ's sakes, this kinda stuff shouldn't be done in the public where everyone can watch and learn the techniques. No doubt the industry is gonna wanna observe any public acts related to its code, and it will learn from them and come with new a fury as an tested watermark or new standard is extracted. Why be premature and rush into it now? The trick is to wait until the RIAA comes out to the public with a virgin watermarking scheme, foisting off its purity. Only then should hackers be ready to rush in and tear it apart, thus protecting consumers from whatever digital terrorism the RIAA chooses to practice.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Now that this survey has shown us how deep the penetration of the Internet is, let's figure out the stats for the real meaning of the net: PORNO!!!!!
Assuming that each host were to have 10 megs of original, non duplicate pr0n online (yes I know thats a very very low estimate), with 87 million hosts out there, that would mean that there 830 terrabytes of luscious luscious pr0n out for your downloading pleasure! Excuse me while I check out the newsgroups...
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
As much as I want large, firm rights and hard freedom on the net, and as much as I am disgusted by those big, solid corporate conglomerates, I am afraid I must side with the MPAA based on past experience. Let me probe deeper into the situation.
One of my friends was the head of a theater and movie rental store that specialized in adult entertainment and movies (don't make jokes, just read on). Unfortunately he recently had to pull out of the market after his sales had dropped significantly from since last year(the year broadband connections dramatically increased along the country).
Using common screen capture devices along with VCR's, (then later DVD's as the tech progressed), pirates began trading clips, then eventually full adult movies over usenet and irc and ftp, not to mention the new arrival of gnutella, freenet, and scour's client. Now, I'm not drawing size comparisions with Napster, but you must remember that it's not just size that matters, but how it's actually used. Many Napster users actually buy the CD's they pirate. But with the stigma attached to adult entertainment, such films get pirated big time anonymously as people would rather not be seen buying erotic films. My friend's theater dropped over the months in clients, and now about only 2-3 people per day come, as opposed to about 50 or so from last year. He asked a few of his few remaining regulars why sales were dropping so much, and the usual reply he got was, "It's easy to get porn for free anonymously on the net" When he was about to close down, he showed me his business log, reporting that his yearly sales had fallen by 31% from the year before. Because of that, he decided to withdraw from his store and went to look for another job.
I know Slashdot people object to the term piracy, but it definitely hurts others, be it artists, store-owners, or corporate suits. I know the movie industry could never collapse like that, but perhaps the events I have seen with my friend in the adult entertainment industry are harbingers of what may happen to your local video store owner as movie piracy becomes large-scale. I dislike the MPAA, but I think they have a duty to protect everyone in the movie business from potential damage. I hate to say this, but good luck in your suit, MPAA.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Is how Microsoft can let their program be so reckless and promiscuous in terms of security. Here we are, with a big, gaping backdoor hole (and not the first one either) in Outlook, and they take an ex post facto attitude to it. Normally I would protest the Slashdot media whore mentality, but when Microsoft seems so lax to the idea of using protection, I feel it is one of the cases where such a mentality is justified.
We can just be fortunate that the wide open hole was discovered prematurely before it could be suddenly torn apart and violated by the efforts of malicious crackers. The possibility that one cracker could use e-mail to forcibly penetrate the hole in Outlook and spread its malicious, destructive seed deep inside a user's computer is absolutely frightening. I only hope word of this giant hole gets out to the public before it can be used and exploited by ill-willed coders.
I am not a great fan of the open source community, but I will say this in their favor. When source code is left wide open to be poked and prodded by thousands of desiring coders, it provides quicker and better stimulation for improvement. Such crawling bugs and gaping holes are rarely discovered out of nowhere in open source software, because of the continual penetration and examination of the source code that occurs in that software paradigm. Hell, we would not have found out about Outlook's newest backdoor entry point in advance unless some benevolent hackers had rammed their way into the hole and pointed it out to Microsoft and the press.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
As graphic as it may sound, it seems like the online scene is basically one big orgy. The big strong companies are in bed with each other, and then they team up to brutually rape the little guy. No doubt Slashdot has its own little role in bed with all the big online news sites, seeing as how much of the news articles are sucked up out of Zdnet/Cnet and then spit back out at all the site's readers.
I know this is only the news industry, but judging by the current way the big press companies twist the news, I hate to see when these huge media corporations force the smaller, growing news sources to pull out of the scene. It's not too unlikely that this will happen at some point. I'm just afraid that all our news will be deflowered of its meaning and skewed to hell without any alternate perspectives presented. Paranoia perhaps, but not impossible.
At least I take some level of self pleasure in the fact that both Zdnet and Cnet, at least for now, consistently spurt out news that I am actually willing to swallow. I just pray the day doesn't come when every news story I read is so unpleasant that I have to gag and spit it out.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
As one who has spent many a time working his way in and out and in and out of cavernous newsgroups before turning to Deja News. In my experience, Deja is nice little service that loosens up those messy newsgroups and makes my entry a lot less painful.
You should remember that Deja is a free service, not a company that only shells out its service for those with money. Deja does need to make some money, and by inserting ads into their posts, theyre trying get deeper and deeper into the market and ensure maximum penetration. And besides, its not like Deja is trying to rape its customers with heavy ads, the links are just displayed to give you the option of entry. Moreover, as I recall, Slashdot does not have a problem forcing large throbbing banner ads through the pipes of readers.
This is a simple case, not the messy, sticky situation it is drawn out to be here. If you do not like Deja's approach, turn around and look for another point of entry into the newsgroup scene.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Woz seems like a pretty interesting guy. I'm surprised alone about his lack of blood after he got the big throbbing shaft from Steve Jobs at Apple. I'm just guessing it fit really well with him, and he was able to take it with minimal pain.
Woz's refreshing lack of concentration on matters financial shows that he is willing to sacrifice his personal pleasure in the name of his vision, which definitely places him as an ideal partner in the eyes of many. He's the kind of guy who just grits his teeth, and quietly gets to work on the job under the sheets. No wonder he's brought Apple such success even though he isn't one of the suited Apple bigshot whores.
Like his thoughts on the whole MS affair too. I'm glad he doesn't have an irrational phobia about large things coming like most paranoid geeks do. What MS had to offer Apple turned him on, and he agreed with the quickie MS/Apple deal unlike most of the bleeding heart reformers of slashdot.
Just hope you keep working it hard, Woz, cuz you are the best at what you do, and I'm sure Steve Jobs knows that better than anyone else, baby.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Slashdot Mirror
Damn right man, I'm Italian :)
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Round last summer, this cute college doll I was doin' that week or two introduced me to a lil' game called The Sims, which needless to say ended up sucking a fat load of time out of my cushy webmaster job. We'd be playin' the game together late in the morning nearly every day, watching curiously as we made our lil Sims eat, work, play, even mess around with each other (that's the funniest part, even if it ain't as good as the real thing). But what most captured the interest of she and I was the neato house building and furniture options. I got this large money shot cheat off a game tips site, and we'd keep spending the dough to play around with housing options. My favorite houses was the ones we designed based on the Playboy mansion and this dance club one we made.
After a while I grew weary of the game, but my gal took such a fancy to the interior design feature that she decided to drop out of SUNY, and join design school to get an interior decorating job. I moved on to better things since, but when I last talked to her she was having a big ol' blast at design school, all thanks to a few weeks of the Sims! I usually dun think that much of games to be tellin the truth, but that Sims game is all right!
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Man, I'd have to take that with a freaking 12 pound bag of salt. You can tell he has no clue what he's doing just by looking at his "beautiful" female assistants for the article. Hell, I'd rather put my dick in a blender than any of those nasty old hens. Seriously, man, you want to try to attract a good looking woman (or even a non-hideous one). And as a guy who's had more sex than Bruce Perens has imposters (I'm an ex-porn star, so most of it was work though :), I have to say that not only is his whole guide skewed by the grossness and inaccuracy of his female assistants, none of those tricks work unless you're dealing with some pathetic 50 year old woman who's trying to get married so she doesn't alone. I dunno though, at least ESR's guide to getting gargoyles may work if you have one of those genetic diseases where you'll die if you don't have sex with an ugly woman in 24 hours.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
I think the whole community has been sick of AOL picking up companies such as ICQ and just prick-teasing us with idle promises of opening it up. I'm kind of doubtful as to how much AOL will actually put out, especially having looked at the age and size limits in their "agreement." Nonetheless, at least AOL is making some effort to allow ICQ to be examined and probed vigorously by programmers and source code readers, and I think this will benefit both users and the company's reputation in the long run. As another thought, perhaps AOL is tossing the community a small bone in attempt to cover up/improve its image after all the raping of consumers and software technologies it has done.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Clearly the industry and Hack SDMI trying to whore the hacking community through this project. Of course they want hackers to get deep inside and penetrate their carefully constructed code. The hope is that this repeated and constant probing will somehow allow the code to increase its endurance and better survive the pounding it will take when released on a consumer market.
Not that hacking shouldnt occur: of course we want our best hackers to be up and ready to vigorously slam whatever is cranked out by the industry. But for Christ's sakes, this kinda stuff shouldn't be done in the public where everyone can watch and learn the techniques. No doubt the industry is gonna wanna observe any public acts related to its code, and it will learn from them and come with new a fury as an tested watermark or new standard is extracted. Why be premature and rush into it now? The trick is to wait until the RIAA comes out to the public with a virgin watermarking scheme, foisting off its purity. Only then should hackers be ready to rush in and tear it apart, thus protecting consumers from whatever digital terrorism the RIAA chooses to practice.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Now that this survey has shown us how deep the penetration of the Internet is, let's figure out the stats for the real meaning of the net: PORNO!!!!!
Assuming that each host were to have 10 megs of original, non duplicate pr0n online (yes I know thats a very very low estimate), with 87 million hosts out there, that would mean that there 830 terrabytes of luscious luscious pr0n out for your downloading pleasure! Excuse me while I check out the newsgroups...
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
As much as I want large, firm rights and hard freedom on the net, and as much as I am disgusted by those big, solid corporate conglomerates, I am afraid I must side with the MPAA based on past experience. Let me probe deeper into the situation.
One of my friends was the head of a theater and movie rental store that specialized in adult entertainment and movies (don't make jokes, just read on). Unfortunately he recently had to pull out of the market after his sales had dropped significantly from since last year(the year broadband connections dramatically increased along the country).
Using common screen capture devices along with VCR's, (then later DVD's as the tech progressed), pirates began trading clips, then eventually full adult movies over usenet and irc and ftp, not to mention the new arrival of gnutella, freenet, and scour's client. Now, I'm not drawing size comparisions with Napster, but you must remember that it's not just size that matters, but how it's actually used. Many Napster users actually buy the CD's they pirate. But with the stigma attached to adult entertainment, such films get pirated big time anonymously as people would rather not be seen buying erotic films. My friend's theater dropped over the months in clients, and now about only 2-3 people per day come, as opposed to about 50 or so from last year. He asked a few of his few remaining regulars why sales were dropping so much, and the usual reply he got was, "It's easy to get porn for free anonymously on the net" When he was about to close down, he showed me his business log, reporting that his yearly sales had fallen by 31% from the year before. Because of that, he decided to withdraw from his store and went to look for another job.
I know Slashdot people object to the term piracy, but it definitely hurts others, be it artists, store-owners, or corporate suits. I know the movie industry could never collapse like that, but perhaps the events I have seen with my friend in the adult entertainment industry are harbingers of what may happen to your local video store owner as movie piracy becomes large-scale. I dislike the MPAA, but I think they have a duty to protect everyone in the movie business from potential damage. I hate to say this, but good luck in your suit, MPAA.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
For those of you interested in reading the real Kama Sutra, check this page out
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Is how Microsoft can let their program be so reckless and promiscuous in terms of security. Here we are, with a big, gaping backdoor hole (and not the first one either) in Outlook, and they take an ex post facto attitude to it. Normally I would protest the Slashdot media whore mentality, but when Microsoft seems so lax to the idea of using protection, I feel it is one of the cases where such a mentality is justified.
We can just be fortunate that the wide open hole was discovered prematurely before it could be suddenly torn apart and violated by the efforts of malicious crackers. The possibility that one cracker could use e-mail to forcibly penetrate the hole in Outlook and spread its malicious, destructive seed deep inside a user's computer is absolutely frightening. I only hope word of this giant hole gets out to the public before it can be used and exploited by ill-willed coders.
I am not a great fan of the open source community, but I will say this in their favor. When source code is left wide open to be poked and prodded by thousands of desiring coders, it provides quicker and better stimulation for improvement. Such crawling bugs and gaping holes are rarely discovered out of nowhere in open source software, because of the continual penetration and examination of the source code that occurs in that software paradigm. Hell, we would not have found out about Outlook's newest backdoor entry point in advance unless some benevolent hackers had rammed their way into the hole and pointed it out to Microsoft and the press.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
As graphic as it may sound, it seems like the online scene is basically one big orgy. The big strong companies are in bed with each other, and then they team up to brutually rape the little guy. No doubt Slashdot has its own little role in bed with all the big online news sites, seeing as how much of the news articles are sucked up out of Zdnet/Cnet and then spit back out at all the site's readers.
I know this is only the news industry, but judging by the current way the big press companies twist the news, I hate to see when these huge media corporations force the smaller, growing news sources to pull out of the scene. It's not too unlikely that this will happen at some point. I'm just afraid that all our news will be deflowered of its meaning and skewed to hell without any alternate perspectives presented. Paranoia perhaps, but not impossible.
At least I take some level of self pleasure in the fact that both Zdnet and Cnet, at least for now, consistently spurt out news that I am actually willing to swallow. I just pray the day doesn't come when every news story I read is so unpleasant that I have to gag and spit it out.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
As one who has spent many a time working his way in and out and in and out of cavernous newsgroups before turning to Deja News. In my experience, Deja is nice little service that loosens up those messy newsgroups and makes my entry a lot less painful.
You should remember that Deja is a free service, not a company that only shells out its service for those with money. Deja does need to make some money, and by inserting ads into their posts, theyre trying get deeper and deeper into the market and ensure maximum penetration. And besides, its not like Deja is trying to rape its customers with heavy ads, the links are just displayed to give you the option of entry. Moreover, as I recall, Slashdot does not have a problem forcing large throbbing banner ads through the pipes of readers.
This is a simple case, not the messy, sticky situation it is drawn out to be here. If you do not like Deja's approach, turn around and look for another point of entry into the newsgroup scene.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
Woz seems like a pretty interesting guy. I'm surprised alone about his lack of blood after he got the big throbbing shaft from Steve Jobs at Apple. I'm just guessing it fit really well with him, and he was able to take it with minimal pain.
Woz's refreshing lack of concentration on matters financial shows that he is willing to sacrifice his personal pleasure in the name of his vision, which definitely places him as an ideal partner in the eyes of many. He's the kind of guy who just grits his teeth, and quietly gets to work on the job under the sheets. No wonder he's brought Apple such success even though he isn't one of the suited Apple bigshot whores.
Like his thoughts on the whole MS affair too. I'm glad he doesn't have an irrational phobia about large things coming like most paranoid geeks do. What MS had to offer Apple turned him on, and he agreed with the quickie MS/Apple deal unlike most of the bleeding heart reformers of slashdot.
Just hope you keep working it hard, Woz, cuz you are the best at what you do, and I'm sure Steve Jobs knows that better than anyone else, baby.
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."